“I shall not drink,” said Hund carefully. “I watch only.”
Piruusi did not seem mollified, but he remained silent as the old man waved the others to sit on the skin floor, handed each of them a birchwood frame to support their backs. He began to sing a monotonous chanting song, from time to time shaking a rattle. From somewhere outside the tent a small drum thumped in accompaniment.
“He is calling the spirits to guide us,” said Piruusi. “How many reindeer do you want for that gold ring on other arm? I can give you two, fat ones, though no other man would give you more than one.”
Shef grinned and made a counter-offer of three entire silver pennies for three reindeer, one penny to be returned in exchange for their hides. Realizing with some relief that his guest was not completely insane, Piruusi cackled professionally and tried again.
As they reached a final agreement—ten silver pennies and a gold finger-ring for five reindeer, hides to be returned, and twenty pounds of bird feathers for sleeping bags—Pehto ended his song. With the lack of ceremony which the Finns seemed to use, he reached out of the tent and took a large steaming vessel passed in by the unknown hands that had beat the drum. He dippered out of it in turn four large mugs of hollowed pine and handed one each to Piruusi, Karli and Shef, kept the fourth himself.
“Drink,” he said, in Norse.
Shef passed his mug without words to Hund, who sniffed it carefully, dipped a finger in and licked it. As he did so Piruusi's brow cleared. At last he had realized the function of the third man. He was a taster. Certainly the one- eye was a man of great importance, to have such a functionary.
“It is water in which the fly killer mushroom has been boiled.”
“Is it safe to drink?”
“Safe for you, I think. You are used to these things. I dare say it will do Karli no harm.”
Shef raised the mug politely to his host, and drank deep. Round him the others did the same. Shef observed that it seemed to be the polite thing to drink a third, pause, drink some more, pause again, and finish the draught. The liquid tasted hot, musty, with a faint bitterness: not pleasant, but better than many things Hund had made him swallow. The men sat in silence for a while, drifting into their own thoughts.
Shef felt his soul rise through his mouth and out, through the tent as if it were impalpable, out into the wide air and wheeling like a bird over the dark wood and the great expanse of white moorland that lay all around it. He noted with interest the lake, part-frozen, that lay on the other side of the wood, not far away: Ceolwulf had been right. But while his mind was interested, his soul was not. It darted away, like a flash, winging westwards. As it shot across land and sea, as fast as thought, the light came back into the world. At the place where it hovered, it was still evening, not night. Still autumn, not winter.
It was Hedeby. Shef recognized the mound where he had sat outside the walls and seen the terrible defeat and sacrifice that took place long ago. But the air of peace that hung over the countryside then, when he had sat there, was gone now. No contented plowman, no smoking chimneys. Instead a great camp of tents outside the wall, and lining the walls hundreds of men. It was like the siege of York that Shef had seen, and ended, two years before.
Except for two things. The walls were wood, not the stone of the Rome-folk. And the defenders had no mind to let the walls do all the work for them. Many were outside, skirmishing with the besiegers, fighting it out with sword and spear and battle-axe, exiting from sally-ports and wickets, making their raids, and returning hastily or triumphantly to the stockade.
Yet there was a pattern to the confusion, Shef slowly saw. And as he saw it, the conviction grew on him that he was not seeing the past, or some mythical story, or something that might have been. What he saw was taking place at the same moment as he sat in the Finn's tent. It was a vision, but a vision of the real, one that needed no interpretation.
The besiegers were fighting to set up catapults, mules, by the knoll where Shef had sat. The besieged were trying to hinder them. Not successfully. But then they had only been playing for time. The skirmishers heard a horn blast, drew back. On the walls nearest to the three mules that the besiegers had set up were six, ten, a dozen of the simple stone-lobbing machines that Shef had himself invented, the pull-throwers. They were set up now on platforms broadening the stockade's fighting gangways.
Pull-teams clustered round each one, eight men to a machine, holding the ropes. The long arms were lowered, the thrower-captains loaded rocks into the slings, tugged the arms down. The pullers heaved in unison—not quite in unison, Shef noted professionally, the fault of the unbiddable Norsemen—the arms swept up, the slings lashed round.
A rain of stones landing round the mules, each one ten pounds' weight, coming from the top of a two-hundred-yard arc, enough to batter a helmet in on a skull and the skull into the neck. But only landing round the mules. The trouble with the pull-throwers, as Shef remembered clearly, was that they were easy to aim for line but very hard to adjust for range. The missiles were lobbed, not flung. Fine against a static army, especially one caught in a long line. Against a point target, like trying to lob stones into a bucket thirty yards off.
Shef's vision seemed to sharpen as he watched. He recognized, on the wall, shouting exhortations, the fat but formidable figure of King Hrorik, who had sold him on to the Way. He was wearing a silver helmet and carried a painted shield. And he was shouting at—in the far-off tent in the birch-woods the Shef-body grunted with surprise—shouting at Lulla, who had deserted at the Gula-Thing. So that was who had been paying the high wages for experts.
Lulla, Shef could see, was trying to set up a mule, and Edwi, the other deserter, another one ten yards away. They were having trouble. Unlike the relatively light pull-throwers, their force given by muscle-power, the mules were made of the heaviest timber to take the shock of the throwing-arm's strike. Difficult to get up high on to a fighting-platform, and not easy once you did it. But they had swayed the machines up on sheer-legs, and both the Englishmen were running round, each one trying to do, or to check, what would normally take a full catapult-team of eight.
They were going to be too late. The besiegers… Who were the besiegers? With a feeling of growing doom Shef saw the Raven Banner advancing across the battle-plain, the three Ragnarssons clustered about it. Even at a distance the strange white-surrounded pupils of the Snake-eye seemed to pierce the walls and the defenses, and Shef flinched as the gaze seemed to pass through him. They were calling their men on, rallying them for a charge, because they knew…
Their own mules shot first. Two of them. One had taken a rock from a pull-thrower right on its retainer bolt, and the crew, casualties lying around them, were struggling frantically to free the bent metal. But two was almost enough. One shot low, sent its ball skimming along into the earth-wall at the base of the stockade, where it bounced and flew just over the stockade. The second struck square on, in an instant beat flat a gap three tree-trunks wide. The Ragnarsson stormers surged forward, were stopped and heaved back.
Lulla had got his machine ready, was yelling at King Hrorik, who shouted back and hit him over the shoulders with his sword-flat. Lulla crouched behind the machine, shrieking directions—his crew seemed baffled by them—trying to get line and elevation correct. Then, battered again by the sweating Hrorik, he pulled the release.
And a hit! Shef heard voices cheering, wondered if one was his own. One of the Ragnarsson mules had disintegrated, hit square on by the much more powerful mule-ball, its crew scattered round it, laid low by splinters or the lashing twisted ropes suddenly released.
Edwi's mule shot an instant later. For a moment Shef could not follow the flight, then he realized, seeing the Ragnarsson crews duck their heads in automatic reflex, that it had shot a foot too high, skimming over the crewmen's heads and speeding on to land half a mile over.
And now the Ragnarssons had the range, had got their third mule repaired as well. Shef saw the mule-captains glance at each other, lift arms to show they were ready, drop them together as the signal to shoot. They had learnt that well. Who had taught them? More deserters? Many men had learnt how the machines worked, in Shef's army or Ivar's, or maybe even from their first makers, the black monks of York.
Shef's soul in the sky saw the flying stones trundle through the air as if they flew through treacle. He had time to project their flight, to see where they would strike, to try to gasp out warning. Then time was at the right speed again. He saw the stones smash through the logs, hurl aside the machines they had been aimed at, sweep the whole pile of wood and rope and stones and men off the wall in a shrieking pile. There was
