instructed, trotting forward to the attack only when they heard the first clash of battle. Shef hoped his timing had been correct. He had stationed them two hundred yards form the palisade. Estimated that if they ran forward when they heard the attack they would reach the camp when the armed struggle was joined and intense. All eyes should be on the Viking attack-force—all of Ivar's men rushing to the aid of their comrades. So he fervently hoped. He reached the corner of the camp just as the running men appeared.
Halberdiers led the way, each weighted with a great bundle of brushwood as well as his weapon. To be hurled into the ditch before the sharp blades were wielded against the stakes and the leather thongs that bound the palisade together.
The second wave of attackers approached, crossbowmen who pushed between the halberdiers, used knives to sever the last of the bindings, heaved stakes aside, climbed over and through them.
Shef followed them, pushing forward through the jostling ranks. No need to shout orders. The crossbowmen were following their long-rehearsed instructions, pacing forward ten carefully counted steps, then stopping and forming a line. Others halted behind them to make a double line that stretched from wall to river-line. Swift runners dashed forward to cut the tent-ropes, fled back to safety as the archers fitted bolts to cocked strings.
A few drabs and youths had seen them, had stood gape-mouthed and fled. But incredibly, none of Ivar's men seemed aware of their presence, totally taken up with the familiar clash of weapons coming from the other wall.
Shef stepped a pace beyond the double line, saw the faces turning toward him for the prearranged signal. He raised his arm, dropped it. The heads turned to their front, sighted for an instant. Then the sharp snap of a hundred strings released together.
The short, stout arrows shot across the camp, driving through leather and mail and flesh.
Already the front rank had hooked onto their tackle to reload, while the second rank stepped forward between them, looked to Shef, caught his signal, loosed their second volley.
Shouts of alarm and disbelief were now mingling with cries of pain as the warriors saw men falling, all to the rear of the battle. Heads turned, faces pale in the dawn's light, to see the silent death that was striking them from the rear, while the Vikings of the Way still kept up their violent pressure from the front, expending energy furiously in an assault they had been promised would last only minutes.
The first row of bowmen was ready again. As each man finished loading, he stepped through the line in front to resume rank. Some faster than others. Shef waited impassively till the last had formed up—the lines must be kept separate if this maneuver was to work—before he dropped his arm again.
Four times the lines shot before the first of the defenders could turn, order themselves and race across the camp in a wavering line, hindered by collapsed tents and the embers of cooking fires. As they closed, the bowmen obeyed orders again. Shot if they had loaded, then turned and ran with the rest, through the ranks of halberdiers dressed behind them. The halberdiers shifted sideways to let their fellows pass, then closed ranks again in a solid line of points.
“Don't advance, just stand!” shouted Shef as he followed the last of the crossbows through. Few could hear him over the growing din of war-cries. Yet he knew this was the moment Brand had said would not work: the puny slave-born taking the full weight of a Viking charge.
The English obeyed their orders. Stood still, points leveled, second rank bracing the first. Even a man whose belly crawled with fear knew he had to do no more than he could. And the Viking charge did not come with full weight. Too many men shot down, and those the leaders; too many of the rest, uncertain, unprepared. The wave that came to hack at the wall of steel came piecemeal. Each man who ran in faced a point in front, blades chopping from either side. The blows they swung were caught by long shafts thrusting from the rear ranks. Slowly the Vikings drew back from the unshaken line, looking round for leadership.
As they did so a cry of triumph rang from behind them. Viga-Brand, seeing the battle-line in front of him thin and shred, had thrown his picked men through the center of what remained, to wheel instantly and to start to roll up the Ragnarsson line.
Beaten men began to throw their weapons down.
From the riverbank Ivar Ragnarsson stood and watched his men fall, then surrender. Sleeping in his ship, the
He knew why, too. The last few days of blood and slaughter had been a delight for him, a relief. The easing of some frenzy that had lain within him for many years, consoled only now and then and only for a time by the brief pleasures his brothers had arranged for him, or by the grand executions the Great Army had tolerated as appropriate. A delight for him; the army had slowly sickened of it. It had rotted their morale. Not much. Enough to make them put a little less than their best into the desperate defense they had needed.
He did not regret what he had done. What he regretted was that this attack could only come from one man, from the Sigvarthsson. The attack in the night, the instant breaching of his defenses. Then, when his warriors rallied for battle, the cowardly attack from the rear. The engagement was truly lost. He had fled a lost battle before—must he flee again? The victors were close on him, and on the other side of the river—moved across on clumsy punts and rafts five miles downstream—waited the ten torsion dart-throwers, lined up wheel to wheel, guided to their position by willing local churls. As the light strengthened, the twist-shooter teams lowered their sights on to the Ragnarsson ships.
On Ivar's ship, the
“Boom off,” he ordered. “Leave that. Push out from shore.”
“Are you deserting your men already?” asked Dolgfinn, standing with a clutch of senior skippers a few feet away. “Without so much as a blow struck? That may sound bad when the story is told.”
“Not deserting. Getting ready to fight. Come aboard if that's what you mean to do. If you mean to stand round like old whores waiting for trade, stay where you are.”
Dolgfinn flushed at the insult, stepped forward with his hand on hilt. Feathers sprouted suddenly from his temple, and he fell. With the camp taken, the crossbowmen had fanned out again, shooting wherever they saw resistance. Ivar stepped behind the protecting bulk of the machine mounted on the prow of the ship. As the slaves clumsily poled the
“You. Jump. Over here.”
Reluctantly Erkenbert the archdeacon gathered up his black robe, leapt the widening gap of water, landed staggering in Ivar's arms.
Ivar jerked a thumb at the crossbowmen growing ever more visible in the dawning light. “More machines you did not tell me of. I suppose you will tell me they cannot exist either. If I live past today I will cut your heart out and burn your minster to the ground.”
To the slaves he shouted, “Stop pushing. Drop anchor. Drop the gangplank.”
As the mystified slaves heaved the weighted, two-foot-wide plank from gunwale to shore, Ivar placed the stout protective beam of his machine behind him, took a firm grip on Erkenbert's right wrist, and leaned back to watch his army die. Unafraid, he had only one thought left: how to spoil his enemies' triumph, how to sour victory into failure.
Firmly escorted, Shef walked forward through the chaos of the camp. His helmet was strapped on, his halberd was over his shoulder. He had not yet struck a blow or dodged one. Ivar's army was no more. The Waymen were rounding up prisoners while a few survivors ran toward the river, running in twos and threes both ways along the bank to get away. There were not many of them, surely not enough to be a threat.
The battle was won, Shef told himself, and won easily, exactly according to plan. Yet something still chilled in his belly: too easy, he felt, too easy. The gods demand a price for favors. What was it to be? He began to run in earnest, heading for the helmet of Brand, now at the very tip of the Waymen's advance toward the river and the ships. As he did so, a flash of color came from the mast of one of the ships only a few yards ahead, gold catching the first direct rays of the rising sun. It was the Coiling Worm. Ivar had broken out his banner.
