One King's Way

always of bad stock? Perhaps the singer thought that not fleeing and being noble were always the same thing. If he did, he was wrong.

And the god had said he must take every advantage. Something told Shef that was wrong too. That was it, there was something that had been bothering him. He sat up, called to his attendant. “Pass the word for the Englishman Udd.”

By the time Shef had his shoes on, Udd was there. Shef looked at him critically. He was trying to hold himself together, but his face was white and strained. He had been looking like that for days. No wonder. He had spent weeks waiting for a painful death, and been rescued only at the last moment. Before that he had gone through more danger and hardship than he would have done in six lifetimes as a smith's helper, which is what he had been once. He had been overtaxed. Yet he would not wish to desert now.

“Udd,” Shef said, “I have a special assignment for you.” Udd's lower lip quivered, the look of fear became more pronounced. “I want you to leave the Fearnought and stay with the rearguard.”

“Why, lord?”

Shef thought quickly. “So you can pass a message for me, if—if the day goes badly. Here, take this money. It will buy you a passage back to England one day, if that is what it comes to. If that happens, you are to greet King Alfred for me, and say I am sorry we could not work together for longer. And greet his queen from me as well.”

Udd was looking surprised, relieved, slightly ashamed. “And what is the message for her, lord?”

“Nothing. Nothing. Just greetings, and the memory of old times. And listen, Udd. I wouldn't trust anyone to do this for me. I'm relying on you. Don't let me down.”

The little man went out, still looking relieved. But less ashamed. Pointless, thought Shef. And directly against what the god said. We might need Udd during the day. But I could not bear to see those terrified eyes any more. Taking Udd out of the battle was an act of kindness. Also of defiance against the cynic-god Rig, his father and mentor.

Shef came out of the tent whistling, startling the sentries, who were used at least to reflective silence on mornings like this one. He hailed Cwicca, listening to Udd's explanation a few feet away. “Have you got that bagpipe you made over the winter, Cwicca? Well, play it today. If that doesn't scare the Ragnarssons, nothing will.”

Hours later, on a calm sea, the fleet crawled towards the bay behind which lay the long-inviolate Braethraborg. To the left of it, as the fleet approached from the north, a spit of land jutted out. On it, just visible, the hulks of the Ragnarssons' four-mule catapult battery, flanked by the twist-shooters or torsion dart-throwers, and flanked again by the cheap, simple, inaccurate stone-lobbers. Out from the spit, almost blocking the entrance to the bay, lay the dozen shapes of the Ragnarssons' largest warships, the coastal patrol that never put out to sea. Behind them clustered the mass of conventional longships, the main body of their fleet, headed by Shef's old enemy, the Frani Ormr.

In the Fearnought Shef could hear the rowers grunting as they heaved on the oars—less oars now than sweeps. They were twice the size of ordinary oars and manned by two men each, the strongest in the fleet, carefully selected by Brand and Hagbarth. They had made their approach under sail, to save the rowers' strength, but now the time had come to strike the mast and yard. Close by, on the same course as the Fearnought, King Olaf's four large craft, each the size of the wrecked Crane, kept pace. Kept pace easily, at a paddling stroke, the rowers looking sideways at the strange ship they convoyed.

Shef had finally given orders to fit the plates of case-hardened steel. The two fighting platforms with the rotating mules on them were armored up to waist height, the plates slanting outwards. It would have been impossible to armor the rest of the ship and still have her float and move, but Shef had rigged a frame that bolted onto each gunwale. On this plates were fitted, overlapping like the shingles on a roof, or like dragon-scales. They too sloped from bottom to top, beginning just above the height of the oarsmen's heads and running up till they almost met six feet above.

“You keep your shield up in battle,” Shef had explained to a doubtful Hagbarth. “At least if you're expecting spears and arrows from a distance. And you keep it slanted so they'll skid off. That's what we're going to try.”

Behind the laboring Fearnought and the large ships, as with the Ragnarsson fleet, came the mass of the attackers in the eighteen-oar-a-side craft that were the backbone of all Viking navies. Each towed behind it, hard to see in the sun-dazzle off the water, a smaller boat, fishermen's skiffs like the grind-boats of the far north, all that the local fishing villages could raise. Each held four to eight rowers and two pairs of extra men jammed in. The rowers had again been carefully selected from the best of the Swedes and Norwegians. In each boat two men clutched crossbows, two more were Bruno's German Ritters.

Watching from his place in the center, Sigurth Ragnarsson remarked, “Masts stepped, I see.”

“Does that mean there'll be no funny business this time?” asked Ubbi.

“I doubt it very much,” answered Sigurth. “But we know some tricks ourselves now. Let's hope they're good ones.”

Shef stood on top of the forward mule, almost the only place left on the Fearnought from which one could now see anything. With his one eye he watched the Ragnarsson catapult battery. He was sharp-sighted, but not enough to see what he needed to. There had to be a way to look closer! He needed to know if they were ready to shoot. If they were cunning, they might hold their first volley till Olaf's ships were in range, conceivably sink all four of them with their first rocks. If that happened the battle would be lost before it started, Shef's “scissors”—for so he had mentally labeled the big vessels in his plan—blunted by the catapults' “stone.” Yet he did not want to stop the ships too far out. The less distance that had to be covered by the small boats, the “paper” in his plan, the better.

They were close to being in range, he decided. He turned and waved to King Olaf, standing next to Brand on the forecastle of his heavy ship fifty yards off, three sweeps from side to side. Olaf waved in reply, called an order. As the rowers tossed their oars and the ship lost way, a thirty-pound boulder came sighing out of the sky, at extreme range. It plumped into the water ten feet from the prow of Olaf's Heron, the splash throwing spray over the king. Shef grimaced. A little too closely calculated. Would they try again?

The four big ships had lost way, were being left behind as the Fearnought ground slowly on into catapult range. Behind them the mass of the fleet had tossed oars as well, were drifting gently forward. As they did so they dropped their tows. The dead silence of the approach was broken suddenly by harsh cheering. The skiffs had cast off, their fresh rowers straining at their oars, each boat making the best pace it could, treating the last mile as a race. As they swept past first their tow-ships and then the leading line of large craft, the oarsmen lined the side, cheering in unison as their boatswains called the time.

The first of the skiffs shot past the Fearnought, its helmsman one of Brand's Halogalanders. Shef could hear him shouting, “Put your backs into it, will you, before some Swedish prick gets past us.” Shef waved to him, to the two skogarmenn crossbows crouched on the rear thwart, to Bruno in one of the pursuing boats, and to the rest of them pouring past, sixty of them spread out like hounds on the scent of a stag. His oarsmen were breathing too deep to cheer, driving their immensely heavy ship on at a quarter the speed of the racing skiffs.

How would the catapults take that? Shef saw spouts of water rise suddenly, two of them, then a third, and felt his heart leap. Every plume was a miss, every miss was one fewer chance to shoot, and a minute gained before they could rewind their clumsy machines. Yet there must have been a hit, yes, there, near the leading skiffs, men struggling in the water by shattered planks. No-one was stopping or slowing to pick them up. Shef had rubbed that in hard. No survivors will be rescued. Keep rowing and leave them. Some of the mailed men would drown, some, he hoped, keep themselves afloat on planks and swim to the nearer shore. The skiffs swept on like so many water- beetles, oars skimming. The Fearnought was perhaps a furlong closer to the grim, banner-waving line of the Ragnarsson fleet.

“Give me a hundred strokes,” shouted Shef to the rowers. “A hundred strokes and you can rest easy. Hagbarth, call the time. Cwicca, play them along.”

The big men began to heave harder, using up the last of their hoarded strength, something they would never