One King's Way

need to hire a forge for the day.”

The spokesmen parted, let the little cavalcade pass through.

King Alfred's good silver pennies met with immediate approval inside the Thing-ground, and within hours Shef, stripped again to the waist and wearing a charred leather apron, was beating out metal at a hired forge with borrowed tools. Brand had headed straight off to the harbor a mile away, the rest had been told to establish a perimeter with stakes and rope and not stray outside it. Cuthred had been settled down with a carefully-organized team of minders. His likes and dislikes were well-known to everyone by now. He responded well to Udd, for some reason, probably because of the little man's total lack of any threat, and would listen for hours to Udd's boring monologues on the subject of metal-working. He liked the motherly comfort of the older and plainer women. Any sign of sexual display or intimacy from one of the younger women, even an accidental turn of hip or glimpse of calf, was likely to set his face in murderous lines. He tolerated the weakest of the thralls and freedmen, obeyed Shef, sneered at Brand, bristled at any sign of strength or competition from other men. If Karli, young, strong and popular with the women, so much as came into sight, Cuthred's eyes would follow him. Shef, noticing it, had told Karli to keep well away from him at all times. He had also told Cwicca and Osmod to set up a rota: two men with crossbows to watch Cuthred at all times, without being seen to do so. A tame berserk was valuable, especially for crossing hostile country. Unfortunately there were no tame berserks.

As some form of protection for their straggle of runaways, Shef had begun by beating out a dozen Wayman pendants. Only of iron, for the silver Waymen preferred had other uses at the moment. But at least they would be distinctive. To make them more so, Shef had made all of them his own emblem, the pole-ladder of Rig. None of the people they had rescued knew what it meant, but they would wear it as a talisman.

His next task was to see every man had at least some form of weapon: not for use, or at least he hoped not, but as a mark of status in a world where every free man carried at the very least spear and knife. Shef had bought a bundle of ten-inch spikes used to fix timber where doweling pegs would not do, and was beating each into a spearhead, to be sunk into ash-shafts and lashed tight with wetted rawhide. They would outfit their newest recruits. The catapulteers still had their halberds, knives and crossbows. Shef had taken back his cutlass from Cuthred, and straightened once more Karli's cheap and ineffective sword. The fight at Flaa had yielded a handful of other weapons, including Vigdjarf's sword, picked up and handed over to Cuthred.

The last of the spearheads done, Shef turned to his final job: converting the case-hardened shield into an offensive weapon for Cuthred. Although he seemed to have forgotten all his training in scientific fencing with shield and broadsword he kept the shield by him at all times. He was parted from it only with great difficulty and stood close and watched as Shef, remembering Muirtach and Ivar's Gaddgedill followers, decided to remove the double leather grips for hand and forearm and put a straight handhold across the shield's center on the inside. Cuthred grunted what might have been approval, then, with great reluctance, let Shef take the shield to the smithy where he fixed one of the ten-inch spikes to its middle on the outside. There was no way of driving a hole through the metal without ruining a dozen punches, so he would weld it on to the case-hardened surface. A tricky job, involving desperate efforts by relays of bellows-men to keep the metal glowing as near white-hot as they could manage.

Straightening, finally, Shef picked the shield up, rotated it from side to side in his left hand, and reflected that what was hard even for his smithy-trained muscle would be light work for Cuthred. He turned and walked out of the borrowed booth. Found himself face to face with a newcomer. He rubbed the smoke from his eyes, blinking in the sunlight, and recognized a grinning Thorvin, Brand just behind him.

“I see you are yourself again,” said Thorvin, gripping his hand. “I told Brand that if you were well we need only head for the sound of the hammer.”

Chapter Nineteen

“When King Halvdan knew that his son was dead,” Thorvin explained an hour later, seated comfortably on a camp-stool with a mug of bought ale in his hand, “he went into a giant-rage. He told his mother that she had lived too long, put a rope round her neck, and told her to stab and hang herself at the same time as a sacrifice to Othin, so that little Harald might join the warriors in Valhalla. She did it willingly, or so I heard. Then he found that Brand was missing, and Shef's men as well, and decided to take it out on Brand's ship and crew. But they barricaded themselves in a hall in the college of the Way, and called on some of the rest of us to protect them. Valgrim sided with Halvdan, and many of his followers too, and for a while it seemed there might be civil war even within the college of the Way.

“But Halvdan did another thing. It could not be hidden from him that Shef had been on the island of Drottningsholm, and one of Stein's guardsmen confessed that he had been invited there. So Halvdan had Ragnhild to blame as well, and swore that she should follow his mother into the mound for her disloyalty and carelessness over his son.”

“Well.” Thorvin took another pull at his ale. “He was dead the next day. Dead in his bed. Died a straw-death, like a worn-out thrall.”

“What symptoms did he show?” asked Hund, sitting close by on the ground.

“Ingulf said, henbane poisoning.” Karli, also allowed to listen to the informal council, rolled his eyes, opened his mouth to say something, shut it again as he caught Thorvin's eye.

“So then there were men gathering everywhere, and oaths of vengeance on all sides. It was said that King Halvdan's conquests would seize the chance to break free of the Westfold rule, Queen Ragnhild was supposed to be going back to her people to raise an army to send after the killers of her son, the skippers of the coast guardships all came into port to protect their own interests, Brand's crew got back to the Walrus and asked me to take to flight along with them.”

“But you didn't?” Shef guessed.

Thorvin shook his head. “There was Way business to settle first. Besides, everything quieted down suddenly. King Olaf then showed what was in his hand. Did you ever wonder,” Thorvin inquired, “why they call King Olaf Geirstatha-alfr, Elf-of-Geirstath?

The listeners shook their heads mutely. After a moment Cwicca volunteered, “Alfr is what we call alf. Like in Alfred or Alfwyn. One of the Hidden Folk, but not ugly or vicious like a fen-thurs or a mountain-troll. Elf-women mate with men sometimes, and the other way round, or so they say. They are wise, but they have no souls.”

“What happens to them when they die, then?” asked Thorvin. He looked round, observing the uncertain shrugs and headshakes of his listeners. “None of us knows, though some say they go to a world of their own, one of the nine worlds of which this is the midmost. But others say that they die. Die and then return again. And some say that the same may happen with men born of women. Now that is what King Olaf believed of himself. He said that he had been on this earth before, and that he would yet return in the person of one of his blood. Or if not—for now he has none of his blood or his brother's living—then his life would pass into some other keeping.

“He said, Shef, that he had set a test for you with Valgrim, and that you had passed it. He said that you had taken the luck of his lineage with you, and that from now on his luck and his spirit would flow through yours. And he told me to tell you that you had passed his test and Valgrim's, and he would now hold both Eastfold and Westfold for you. As your under-king.”

Thorvin rose, walked over to where Shef sat, and carefully closed Shef's hands round his own. “King Olaf told me that I was to place my hands in yours on his behalf. He accepts you as the true king, the One who is to come from the North, and asks you to return to take your proper place in his kingdom and in the college of the Way.”

Shef stared round at a ring of equally surprised faces. The very idea of an under-king did not come easily to the Norse or the English alike. A king was someone who acknowledged no superior, by definition. How could an under-king, who accepted an over-king, be a king, rather than a mere jarl or hersir?

“How did his men take this?” asked Shef tentatively. “Olaf has been supported by his brother for many years, has he not? Since they say he lost his luck to him. If the districts were thinking of revolt, Olaf would be able to do little against them. Especially if he declared himself under-king to a stranger.”

Thorvin smiled. “No-one had any time to say anything. After all these years Olaf moved like—like a Ragnarsson. He burned Ragnhild's brother in his hall, before he could get his boots on. He had all the prominent