Shef's foot slipped from the little ledge, provided not in mercy but to prolong the agony of dying. His weight came on his wrists, on his ruined ankle. This time the pain did not wake him but sent him mercifully down below any level of consciousness at all.
Chapter Thirty-four
The Emperor massed his remaining troops beneath the stair from which he had been pulled earlier that day. There was no attempt at concealment or surprise this time. It was like the game the soldiers played. Two men sat each side of a table, gripped hands, and each tried to push the other's arm down. A test of strength, a test, between evenly-matched men, of will. When the soldiers did it and they were drunk enough, they hammered nails up through the table to impale the wrist of the loser. That was a great improver of the will. And that was how things stood now. The whole day had been full of rumors and sudden panics: the Italians had risen, there was an Arab fleet at the coast, the pagan king had escaped with magic wings to bring up a new army. None of that mattered. The pagan king was dead, or soon would be. His army would be destroyed before sundown. After that Bruno was ready to fall back into the hills, retreat all the way to Germany before he gathered strength and returned. But he would leave no unfinished business, no center to grow a legend of victory.
Brand had spent the afternoon polishing his armor and considering his weapons. He was of the same mind as the Emperor. Most of his army, such of it as was left, was reduced to spectator status by wounds or loss of ammunition. Most of the opposing army, he reckoned, was much the same. He had seen the guard-posts outside the wall shrink all day, from desertion, from call-up of the reliable units to face the immediate danger inside the wall. It would turn, now, on a clash of a few men. Maybe, he thought, two men.
The question was, what to fight the bastard with. Brand did not think the Emperor was as quick as Ivar, or as strong as himself. But he was certainly quicker than Styrr, or Brand, and stronger than Ivar. Brand had decided to abandon his axe “Battle-troll.” Against a really good swordsman, rather than a fair or moderate one, it was a disadvantage. He had borrowed a sword from Guthmund, flexed it a few times, rejected it. In the end he had decided to rely on main strength, in which he was every man's master. He had taken one of the English pygmies' halberds, sawn off half the shaft, and constructed for himself an axe of massive proportions. No other man could wield something like this one-handed. That would be his advantage. The axe one side, the spike the other, the lance-head on top of the shaft. Three weapons in one, and all of them clumsy. He had abandoned his shield as well, taken instead a dead man's and cut it down to half the diameter, strapped it immovably on his left forearm, leaving his left hand free. Round his waist and over his mail he had strapped another dead man's leather jacket, doubled over on the left side to cover more of the area that a proper shield would have protected.
As the enemy trumpets rang out again, Brand slouched to the head of the stair. He was hot, he was thirsty —they had blocked the aqueduct earlier on. He had ceased to be afraid.
The Emperor was at the head of his usual troop of heavy-armed German foot. Mixed in with them were strange contrivances. “What are they?” he muttered to Steffi, standing by him holding one of his three remaining firepots.
“I can see the hoses,” said Steffi. “I think they're for water. Some way of pumping water. To put out fires, maybe.” They were indeed the municipal fire-guardians of the City of Rome, dragged from their hiding by Bruno's agents.
“No need for them,” called out Brand in Norse. He knew Bruno understood it from his long wanderings in quest of the Holy Lance. He turned Steffi round, shoved him gently away.
“Let me come up and fight, big man,” shouted Bruno.
“I'll come down.”
“Will your men surrender if I win?”
“If you win, you can ask them. If I win I'll ask yours.”
The mailed Germans fell back a little from the foot of the stair as Brand walked down it, to leave a space twenty feet across.
Not all eyes were fixed on the scene. On the parapet, high up, Cwicca and Osmod whispered together.
“What do you reckon happened to the boss?”
“He crashed. They'll have picked him up.”
“Dead, do you reckon?”
“Up to us to see,” said Cwicca, still lisping through his broken teeth. “Whether it's win or lose down there, I reckon as soon as it starts to get dark we throw the lines over the wall—I've made half a dozen strong ones from the kite stuff—and we all go down it. All us English, anyway. Then we can butht out and look for him.”
“They'll cut us to bits on the flat. The crossbows are useless now.”
“They're like us, a lot of 'em have had enough. Three hundred of us, whatever it is, with knives and bad tempers—we'll go right through 'em. Head for where those damned machines were, till they gave up, and see who we can catch.”
“I heard you,” said Svandis, breaking in on the whispers. “I'm coming too.”
Behind them there came the sudden clash of metal.
The usual formal swordfight turned on cut and parry, use of sword and shield together, on speed of reaction and strength of wrist. Brand did not mean to fight like that. If he did, he would lose.
The first clash came as the Emperor, without salute or warning, sprang across the space between the duelers and cut low at the unshielded side. Brand met the blow barely in time with the iron head of his halberd, and ducked his head under the instant vicious back-stroke. Then he too was in motion, on his toes, moving round always to the right, away from the Emperor's sword and towards his shield, the Lance-head once more showing above it. After the first blow Brand made no attempt to parry, only to avoid the stroke, keep out of range. Even against the long-armed and ape-shouldered Emperor he had the advantage in reach. He kept back, feinting every few seconds with his ponderous weapon. As the Emperor braced for another forward spring he stepped forward and lashed out. He flicked the twenty-pound iron head with its sharp-filed edge like a boy sweeping a switch at the head of a thistle. The Emperor took it full on his shield, was beaten sideways, stumbled and recovered. He glanced for an instant anxiously at the inside of his shield, where the Holy Lance rested in its holder. Still there, though Bruno's own blood was running down it now from a gashed arm. It ran where his Savior's had eight hundred years before.
“Relics don't help you now,” grunted Brand, his breath beginning to come hard. He was still moving lightly, but the spike of the halberd rested now on his right shoulder, ready to strike again.
“Blasphemer!” replied the Emperor, and stabbed low for the groin.
Brand twisted away from the thrust, slashed at the face, was blocked again. But the Emperor's shield had taken two monstrous blows, was cut deep and splintered. Two more and he would be unprotected. Unprotected both by shield and by relic. The Emperor's left hand was free of its shield-grip, groping across to seize the Lance, to hold on to that even if the shield should be cut away. Brand saw his uncertainty, stepped forward swinging forehand and backhand, high and low, the massive steel head singing through the air as he used the full strength in his forearms, thick as a bear's. The Emperor's turn to dodge away, raising his arms high as a cut hissed past his belly. He was back almost among his own supporters now and Brand backed away, taunting him with his retreat, urging him back into the center of the cleared space.
Not all eyes were on the fight. As the short Italian dusk began to fall, Hund had been seeking his opportunity. He too had heard the whispered exchange of Cwicca and Osmod. Stealthily he took one of the lines Cwicca had prepared. Svandis, looking down at the fight from the edge of the crowd of men on the battlements, felt a hand on her shoulder. Hund beckoned to her, and she turned silently away. In the growing twilight the two padded soft- footed away, reached the aqueduct up which they had come the night before. It was unguarded, the watching sentries turned the other way. Hund motioned to Svandis to drop on all fours. At a scuttling run the little man made
