know. We could have trouble at every farmstead. If there's a village or a town it could be worse.”
“I told you,” Brand replied. “Like taking a nest of mice through Catland.”
“We were relying on our dog,” said Cwicca.
Shef looked at Brand with instant alarm. He had seen Brand challenged or provoked several times during the campaigning winter, in the camps round York or East Anglia. Provoked a good deal more gently or carefully than this, and by men many times more formidable than Cwicca. The response every time had been the instant blow or grapple: a broken arm, a man knocked senseless. This time Brand sat motionless, seemingly deep within himself.
“Yes,” said Brand finally. “You were relying on me. You still can rely on me. I gave my word to see you through to the Gula Fjord, and I will do my best to keep that word. But there's something you ought to know. I know it now, if I didn't before.
“I have been a warrior for twenty-five winters. If I were to count up the men I have killed or the battles I have seen—well, it would sound like a saga of one of King Hrolf's champions, or of old Ragnar Hairy-Breeks himself. In all that time no-one can say I ever turned tail, or held back when the spears crossed.”
He looked round fiercely. “You have seen that! I should not need to boast here.
“But the fight with Ivar took something out of me. I have been wounded many times, and left for dead more than once. I never felt in my own heart that I was dead. When Ivar dodged my blow and got his sword through me I felt the blade in my guts, and I knew, I knew that even if I could get myself off it and live that day, then I would die within two more. I knew. It took less time than a heartbeat, but I could never forget it. Not even after Hund over there sewed up my torn guts and my belly and nursed me through the fever and the draining pus. I am as strong as ever I was now. But I cannot forget what I once knew.”
He looked round again at the others. “And the trouble, is, you see, up here in the mountains, where every district has its champion, and
“You are as strong as ever,” said Osmod. “You would have killed him. Better for all of us if you had.”
“I expect I'd have killed him,” Brand agreed. “He was only the cock of his own midden. But funny things happen when a man loses heart. I have known great warriors stand still with the piss running down their breeches till they were cut down. They freeze, and the Valkyries, Othin's daughters, the Choosers of the Slain, throw their fear-fetters over them.”
The Englishmen sat in silence. Finally Osmod spoke again. “That's it, then. We'd better go through every place we come to all closed up and ready from now on. Halberds showing, crossbows cocked. I wish these silly bastards up here had seen crossbows work. Then they'd be more frightened. But we can't shoot somebody just to show them.
“One other thing,” he added. “Edith didn't go off behind that barn just because she's dumb, you know. She was called over. By a woman. Woman speaking English, not Norse. She must have heard us talking among ourselves. A slave-woman. Been here twenty years.”
Brand nodded heavily. “They have been running slaves out of England for fifty years now. I dare say every farmstead in the whole of the North has its English grinding-slave, or half-a-dozen of them, and men-thralls for the heavy work out in the fields as well. What did she want?”
“Wanted us to take her with us, of course. Spoke to Edith because she thought she'd be sympathetic. Then the men came round the corner, must have been watching.”
“Did you speak to the slave-woman?” asked Shef, finally breaking out of his own internal struggles. “What did you tell her?”
“Told her she couldn't come. Too much trouble for us. I should have said the same to Edith and the others, even if they were down to have their throats cut over some dead prince-brat's tomb. The woman back there was from Norfolk,” Osmod added. “They stole her out of Norwich twenty years ago, when she was a girl. Now she'll grow old and die up here.”
He and Cwicca got to their feet, walked away, began to spread out their blankets.
Shef looked at Brand, did not venture to speak. What the big man had said must have cost him as much grief and inner shame as breaking down in public tears might have done to someone lesser. Shef wondered what sort of man he would be in the future. Could they ever nurse him back to health in his mind, as Hund had done with his body? Long after the rest of the camp was asleep, except for the patrolling sentry, Brand sat restless, moodily breaking sticks and feeding them into the fire.
The next day, as they jogged along through the mountain pinewoods, moving now without the frantic haste of the rush from Halvdan's kingdom, Shef found Udd riding by his side. He looked down with some surprise. Udd normally had little or nothing to say except when there was forge-work to be done. “I've been thinking about those millstones,” said Udd. “They're not very much use up here, because the water only flows half the year. And when it does it's like that.” He pointed to the mountain-stream ahead of them, pouring down in a thin deep channel over a succession of six-foot drops in the hillside.
“What they need here is something more the same all the time.”
“Like what?”
Udd licked a finger, held it up in the air. “No shortage of wind up here, is there?”
Shef laughed. The thought of wind, a thing no-one could see or measure or weigh or even catch, driving the most massive thing that men ever used, the great weight of the millstone, was impossible.
“Wind can drive a ship, though, can't it?” said Udd, reading his leader's thought. “If it can drive a ship that weighs ten tons, why not a stone that only weighs one?”
“Wind's not like water,” said Shef. “It comes from different directions.”
“That doesn't stop the sailors, does it? No, what I was thinking was this…” As they rode on, Udd began to outline his idea of a sail-powered wind-mill, mounted on a rotating frame that could be turned to face the wind by a post like a ship's rudder. As he made objections, received answers, added his own notions, Shef found himself slowly drawn more and more into the deep incommunicable excitement of the inventor. Riding behind them, Cwicca nudged Karli.
“He's got him talking then. About time too. I was getting worried riding through this place with two leaders, both of them in some other world. I wish we could do the same for the other.” He indicated the giant figure of Brand, slouching along at the head of the column with one arm over his over-burdened horse's saddle.
“He may be more of a problem,” cut in Hund from behind them. “I wish we could just get him to his ship.”
The challenge came not at any of the farmsteads they passed through that day, nor the next, though they rode through all of them greeted only by lowering faces and men standing silently by their barns and byres. Forewarned, Shef looked round keenly at every place they came to for signs of the others there, besides the men. Twice he caught sight of thin faces peeping from behind shutters: women hoping for a miracle, or maybe only for a friendly word in their own tongue. In his sleep he thought to hear the grinding noise of the querns, on and on for twenty years, thirty years, marking out a life of hopeless toil.
But at least the farmsteads spread only over a few yards, had in them never more than ten or a dozen men and boys, of all ages, not likely to test their strength against a well-armed body of their own number, even if the strangers came of slave-race and were headed by a doubtful champion. Where the road over the mountain passes finally dipped down into a dale, and the dale ran down to meet two more, the little cavalcade saw before them a cluster of houses spreading out where the streams intersected, and rising above them all a taller building, more than one story, its gables and side-posts fantastically carved into dragon shapes.
Brand reined in, turned to face the others. “That's Flaa,” he said. “It's the main town of the Hallingdal district. They have a temple there. Just try to ride on through as if it was another farm-garth.”
As they rode through the small square at the center of the settlement, the bulk of the timber church to their left, men emerged from between the houses, blocking the path forward and on all sides. They were fully armed, spears and shields ready, bows in the hands of the youths and boys behind the warriors. Shef heard the click of the crossbows being cocked yet again. They might kill or cripple their own number, he was sure. After that they stood
