“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?
Chapter Three
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.