Bruno was approaching the table again, eyes shining with a kind of manic glee. “Now,” he said, “will you write me down?”
As Arno reached for the pen and the parchment he laughed, bent over, collected Erkenbert’s gaze and said with sudden gravity: “Now, comrade. They say you have seen the great champions, Ivar Boneless and maybe the warrior they call Killer-Brand. Tell me, how do you think one such as myself would compare with them? Tell me the truth, now, I take no offense.”
Erkenbert hesitated. He had seen Ivar fight in battle against the champions of Mercia, though only from a fair distance behind. At closer quarters he had seen the duel on the gangplank between Ivar and Brand. He remembered Ivar’s snake-like speed, the unexpected power in his relatively slender frame. Thought of what he had just seen, measuring the strength and leverage of the broad shoulders in front of him.
“Ivar was very quick,” he said at last. “He could dodge a blow rather than block it, and still remain poised to strike back. I think if you had an open space to fight him in you might have worn him down, for you would be the stronger. But Ivar is dead.”
Bruno nodded, face intent. “So what of Killer-Brand, the one who killed him?”
“It was not Brand who killed him. Ivar was too quick for Brand, mighty man though he is. No.” The hatred in Erkenbert’s heart welled up. “It was another who killed Ivar. The son of a churl, devil-possessed. He had only a dog’s name to call himself, Shef, and he did not know his father. In fair fight you would defeat a hundred like him. And now they call him a king!”
The blue eyes were thoughtful. “Yet he killed a great champion, you say, fair fight or no. These things do not happen by accident. Such a man should never be despised. The greatest gift a king can have, some say, is luck.”
By the time Shef reached solid ground he was chilled through, his teeth chattering uncontrollably. The rising tide had forced him to swim twice, no great distance but soaking him through each time. There was no sun to dry him. A fringe of seaweed marked the edge of tidal sand, with just beyond it a shallow dyke, obviously man-made. Shef scrambled to the top of it and turned to look out to sea, hoping against hope that he would see the Norfolk standing in to rescue him, and that in an hour or so he could count on dry clothes and a blanket, a hunk of bread and cheese, maybe a fire on the sand while someone else stood guard. At that moment he could imagine no greater reward for being a king.
There was nothing to be seen. The gray twilight made everything out on the flats seem the same, gray sea, gray sky, gray sandbanks slowly yielding to the water. He had not heard the clash of battle behind him as he made his way to the shore, but that did not mean anything. The Norfolk might have been carried by boarders. Or she might have been refloated and be continuing her single-ship duel with the Frani Ormr. Or both ships might long have sailed out once more to the open sea. There was no hope in that direction.
Shef turned the other way and contemplated the drab landscape in front of him. Plowed fields with shoots of green barley showing. Somewhere a few hundred yards off in the dimness black bulks that might well be grazing cows. All that showed a certain confidence here on the edge of the pirate sea. Were the men of this land great warriors? Or slaves of the Vikings? Or did they rely on the dangerous shoals to keep them safe? Whichever was true, their land was no great prize: flat as a man’s hand, kept from the tide only by a six-foot dyke, muddy, sodden and featureless.
More to the point, there was no prospect of warmth in it anywhere. In a wooded country Shef might have thought to find a fallen tree to break the wind, boughs to pile under and over him to keep him out of the wet, maybe a drift of decaying leaves to rake over himself. Here there was nothing but mud and wet grass. Yet the cows and the plowed fields showed there was a village not too far away. Men never plowed more than a couple of miles from their homes and byres: the time it took an ox to travel that distance, morning and evening, was the most that any sensible man would add on to his day. So there must be a house, and with a house a fire, somewhere all but in sight.