is spared. And the more it is spared the stronger we are, and the weaker they grow.”
He hesitated again. “Are you missing your—your brother? I know well that all this goes back to him. If it had not been for him I would have been dead, or a penniless exile, or at best a puppet-king with Bishop Daniel holding my strings. Or some Viking jarl, maybe. I owe him everything.” He patted her hand. “Even you.”
Godive dropped her eyes. Her husband always referred to Shef, now, as her brother, though she knew that he knew that there was no blood relationship between them, that they were stepbrother and stepsister only. Sometimes she thought that Alfred had realized the truth of their relationship, maybe the truth too that her first husband had really been her half-brother. But if he suspected, he was careful to ask no further. He did not know that she had miscarried twice, deliberately, while she had been first married, taking the dangerous birth-wort. If she had believed in any god, the Christian one or the strange pantheon of the Way, she would have prayed to him or them for a safe delivery for what might now be in her womb.
“I hope he is alive.”
“At least no-one has seen him dead. All our traders know there is a reward for any news, and a greater one for the man who brings him back.”
“Not many kings would pay to have a rival return,” said Godive.
“He is no rival to me. My rivals are across the Channel there, or up in the North working mischief. It looks safe as we sit on this hill and look over the fields. I tell you, I would feel twenty times safer if Shef were back in England. He is our best hope. The churls call him
Godive squeezed her husband's arm. “They call you Alfred
In the great tent of striped canvas many days' march and sail to the north, the conference was less happy. The tent had been pitched with its rear into the wind, and the front wall brailed up so the men inside it could also look out. They looked out over a drear landscape of moor and heather, marked here and there by columns of smoke rising, the marks of the harrying parties coming down on one clump of wretched bothies or another. The three Ragnarssons left alive sat on their camp stools, ale-horns in hand. Each had a weapon stuck into the ground beside him, spear or spiked axe, as well as their swords belted on. Twice already that spring, since the battle off the Elbe, one jarl or another had tried to challenge their authority. Sensitive as cats to the constant ebb and flow of reputation on which power rested, all three knew they had to offer their followers a scheme. A bribe. A proposition. Or there would be tents struck in the night, ships missing at the next rendezvous, men gone to try their fortune in the service of some sea-king better favored by luck.
“This is keeping the lads busy,” said the grizzled Ubbi, nodding at the smoke-columns. “Good beef, good mutton, women to run down. No casualties to speak of.”
“No money,” completed Halvdan. “No glory either.”
Sigurth the Snake-eye knew his brothers were just setting the problem up for him to deal with, not offering a criticism. The brothers never fought, hardly ever disagreed. Their relationship had survived even the psychotic Ivar. The other two waited for him to respond.
“If we go south again,” he said, “we run into those rock-throwers again. We can sail rings round them, we know that. But they have the advantage now. They know we're up here in Scotland, because they kept us out of the Channel. All they have to do is harbor somewhere on the coast near their northern border, wherever they choose to draw it. If we sail down-coast, they hit us. If we go round them—and we don't know where they are—they get to hear about it, come down after us, and hit us in harbor, wherever we are. The risk is either meeting them at sea, or getting our ships battered to bits while we're on land. We might end up having to cut our way from coast to coast. And I don't think any of the lads, however big they talk, fancies meeting the rock-throwers at sea again. You can't fight standing on a bundle of planks.”
“So we're beat,” nudged Ubbi. All three men laughed.
“Maybe what we need is some rock-throwers of our own,” suggested Halvdan. “That's what Ivar thought. He made that little black-robed bastard, what was his name? Erkinbjart? He made him make some. Pity the little bastard got away.”
“That's for next year,” said Sigurth. “Can't change horses in mid-stream, and for this year we have to go with what we have. This year we'll pass the word in the slave-markets that we pay high prices for men who can shoot these throwers. Someone will bring one in. And if they can shoot them they can build them. Put someone like that together with a real ship-builder, and we'll have something that can outsail those clumsy English tubs and outfight them too.
“But right now we need something to put heart into our lot and silver into their pouches. Or the hope of silver in their heads, anyway.”
“Ireland,” suggested Halvdan.
“We'd have to go north about round the tip of Scotland now, the place will be aswarm with Norwegians before we get there.”
“Frisia?” offered Ubbi doubtfully.
“Poor as Scotland, only flatter.”
“That's the islands. How about the mainland? Or we could try Hamburg again. Or Bremen.”
“That hasn't been lucky water for us this year,” said Sigurth. His brothers nodded, both of them showing their teeth in involuntary snarl. They remembered the humiliation on the sandbank, coming back from a fruitless hunt with no quarry and a man missing. The humiliation of being outmaneuvered, so that they had to stand back from a challenge from a single man.
“But I think that's the right idea,” said Sigurth. “Or nearly the right idea. We'll keep the lads busy over here for a few weeks yet, give this whole country a complete shaking. Let them know they just have to enjoy themselves, there's something bigger coming. Then we'll go back across the North Sea, direct crossing, head for the granite isles.”
His brothers nodded, knowing he meant the islands of the North Frisians, facing the Ditmarsh, Fohr and Amrum and Sylt, three islands of rock amid a waste of shifting sands.
“Then we go down the Eider and hit Hedeby.”
Halvdan and Ubbi stared at each other, considered. “They're our own people,” said Halvdan. “Sort of. Anyway, they're Danes.”
“So what? Have they done us any favors? That fat trader-king Hrorik wouldn't even sell the man we want to Skuli. He let the Way-priests take him off to their bolt-hole.”
“Maybe we ought to hit them instead.”
“Right. What I'm thinking,” said Sigurth, “is if England is ruled out for us right now, we'll find better returns in our own countries than foraging round these poor places. Riskier, I know. But if we take Hedeby and Hrorik's gold, then there'll be all the more to support us if we go for Halvdan and his idiot brother Olaf. Sure, there'll always be some who'll drop out, got a brother in Kaupang or a father in Hedeby. Plenty left. And the ones we beat in one place will join us for the next place.”
“Roll up the North first,” said Halvdan. “Set you in place as the One King of all the Northlands. Then come back to the South.”
“With a thousand keels, and rock-throwers in the front of them,” amplified Ubbi.
“To finish the Christians once and for all…”
“To fulfill our Bragi-boast long ago…”
“To get revenge for Ivar.”
Halvdan got up, drained his horn, pulled his spiked beard-axe out of the ground. “I'll go round the tents,” he said. “Drop a few hints. Say we've got a plan, and everyone will get a shock when they know it. Keep them quiet just a few weeks longer.”
Erkenbert the deacon stood inside a great ring of ancient stones. It was the doom-ring of the Smaaland peoples, the Little Countries between Danish Skaane and the giant confederacy of the Swedes extending hundreds of miles to the north, a country with many kings striving always to establish one
