such unlucky things as women, cats or priests. Finding that dismissed even by Thorvin, who did intend to sail in the Norfolk, he had fallen back on telling depressing tales from his homeland, tales mostly of the unknown creatures of the sea, the mermaids and marbendills, men who had angered the skerry-elves and been turned into whales, eventually one of a scoffer and scorner whose boat had last been seen being drawn under water by a long arm covered in gray hair. At that, Shef had broken off the conversation. Now he lay, afraid of what his dreams would show him.
When the dream came, Shef knew immediately—for once—exactly where he was. He was in Asgarth, home of the gods, and moreover he was standing exactly outside the greatest of the halls of Asgarth, Valhalla, Othin's home of the heroes. In the distance, though still inside Asgarth, he could see a vast plain, with what looked like a confused battle taking place on it: a battle with no battle-lines, where every man struck everyone else, falling and bleeding at random.
As the day wore on, men fell and did not rise. The battle resolved itself into a string of duels between single men. The losers fell, the winners fought again. In the end only one man was left, hideously wounded, leaning on a great bloody axe. Shef heard a dim and distant cheering: Hermoth, Hermoth.
The dead began to rise, their severed limbs reuniting, the gashes in their sides healing up. They helped each other up, the men who had killed each other laughing and showing how things had gone. Slowly they formed into ranks and began to march back to the great hall, twelve abreast, a column thousands long, the figure with the great axe at their head. They marched round the building a few feet from Shef's unnoticed person, wheeled left and tramped without breaking their ranks or their stride through the double doors of the hall, now flung wide. The doors slammed. Light even in Asgarth began to fade. Sounds of revelry rose from inside.
Now up to the door came limping a poor man, roughly dressed. As Shef looked at him he knew that only in Asgarth could such a creature remain alive. His back was broken in two, so that his upper half lurched along seemingly without connection to his legs. His ribs were splayed wide, his middle crushed flat as if by the stamp of some mighty animal. Burst entrails projected from his coat.
He reached the gate of Valhalla and stared at it. A voice came from inside, one of the mighty voices Shef had often heard before: not the amused and cynical voice of his own patron—or maybe his own father —the god Rig, fomenter of skills and trickery. No, a cold and gravelly voice. This is the owner of the hall, thought Shef. This is Othin the mighty himself.
“Who sent you, mannikin?” said the voice.
Shef could not hear the low reply, but the voice could.
“Ah,” it said. “Well I know his mark. There will be a place for him here among my heroes. When the time comes.”
The crushed man spoke again, still inaudible.
“You?” said the mighty voice. “There is no place here for the likes of you. Who are you to stand in line against the Fenris-brood, when I have need of men? Away with you. Go round the back, to my kitchen-men. Maybe my chamberlain Thjalfi has need of another trencher-licker.”
The crushed man turned and hobbled away, round the building in the opposite direction to that from which the marching host had come. On his face, Shef saw as he passed, was an expression of such desolate despair as he hoped never to see again.
That is a man for whom even death has brought no peace, he thought. Are even the gods allowed to do such harm? What need is it that drives them to such evil?
From his vantage-point in the stern of the leading ship, Shef looked back at the long, trailing line. The Bedfordshire, fourth ship from the van, was sagging out of line again, as she had done ever since, by trial and error, they had picked on their present formation. All ten of the English “battleships,” as Ordlaf insisted on calling them, were heading due east with the south-west wind behind them and on the beam, as easy a point of sailing as could be imagined, certainly far easier than their awkward sail up the first part of the Dutch coast from the Rhine mouth with the wind almost directly behind them. Just the same the Bedfordshire was wallowing slowly out to sea again.
No point in shouting to the ship behind, to pass on a message mouth to mouth till it reached the Bedfordshire's skipper. He knew the importance of keeping in line, he had had it shouted at him time and time again by all the other skippers in turn every time they camped for the night. There was some error in his ship's construction. For some reason or other she made more of this “leeway” that Ordlaf was always complaining about. They would get it fixed when they returned to dock. Meanwhile the Bedfordshire would do what she always did: wallow out to sea till she was a hundred yards out of line, and then brace her sail round and awkwardly maneuver back into place. Where the others sailed along more or less straight, her progress was a string of shallow zig-zags, like the patterns on a welded sword.
It did no harm, at least for the moment, Shef concluded. He had realized one thing, though, and realized it some days before, almost as soon as he and the rest of the landsmen had stopped retching over the side. That was that the reason the Vikings ruled the seas, and could descend at any spot in the Western world regardless of the precautions and the guards of the Christian kings, was that they were very very good at something quite unexpectedly complex and difficult: sailing boats.
The seamen and skippers Shef had recruited from the English coastal ports were good enough sailors in their way, but it was not the Viking way. Fishermen almost to a man, what they were good at was coming back alive. Like Ordlaf, if the children's bellies had to be filled, they would put to sea in almost any weather. They had no interest, though, in getting anywhere unless it were to another likely bank or shoal, and certainly no interest in going anywhere fast or unexpectedly. As for the crewmen from the inland counties, aboard to man the mules and shoot the crossbows, every detail of life at sea was a burden to them. At least six of them had fallen overboard already while trying to attend to their natural functions, though it was true that they had all been recovered from the calm and shallow sea. The main reason Shef insisted on camping every night instead of pressing on was that he dreaded the results of trying to cook afloat.
Shef turned from the problems of the Bedfordshire to the low, sullen, sandy shore slipping by to the right—or to “steerboard” as the sailors called it, the side of the ship which had the long steering- oar mounted. Shef unrolled the long scroll of parchment on which he was attempting, following his earlier experience, to draw a chart of these unfamiliar lands. The natives on the coastal islands they had passed had told him a great deal—they were, of course, Frisians, and the Frisians felt strong kinship both with the English to whom they were related, and to the men of the Way, whose religion and order had been founded by their own Duke Radbod a hundred and fifty years before. But, more important, the Frisians of the islands were the poorest of the poor. On the desolate sandbanks on which they lived, sometimes twenty miles long but never more than a mile across, no hut, no flock of sheep was ever more than ten minutes from a Viking marauder. The islanders lived with little and stood ready to abandon that any moment.
That did not mean they were not happy to strike back. Once the news had spread up along the islands that the strange fleet was an English one, come to fight the Vikings, men had drifted in to every camp fire, eager to speak for a mug of ale or a good silver penny of the new coinage.
The picture they gave was clear. As one rounded the Ijsselmeer the chain of islands began, running like the coast they sheltered slightly north of east. The islands' names seemed to become more familiar as one went further along. The Texel, Vlieland, Terschelling, which they had passed three days before—Shef did not know what those names meant. But then they had passed Schiermonnikoog, and further along a string of similar names, Langeoog, Spiekeroog, and Norderney. All these were easy to understand, for -oog was just the hoarse Frisian way of saying “ey,” an island, an eyot, and -koog was the familiar Norfolk “key,” a sandbank.
And all these islands were just sandbanks, drifts piled up over centuries by the rivers that flowed into the sea and that continually threatened to choke themselves with silt. The first slight break in the chain had been the Ems. Further up, the twin estuaries of the Jade and the Weser, with somewhere inside them
