From the scene Shef felt such a wave of hopelessness as he had never imagined before. And yet there was something strange about it. This slow dying might be years in the future, as he had first thought when he seemed to recognize the woman. Or it might be years in the past. But for a moment Shef seemed to know one thing: the old woman praying for an unnoticed death on the pallet bed was him. Or had he been her?
Shef snapped awake with a jerk and a sense of relief. Round him the camp lay quiet in its blankets. He let his inhaled breath out slowly and relaxed his tensed muscles one at a time.
They came out of the marsh the next morning almost in a stride. One moment they were plodding forward through the black pools and across the shallow streams that seemed to flow in no direction, in a thin cold mist. Then the ground was rising beneath their feet, the mist cleared away, and barely a mile off across bare turf, Shef could see the Army Road marching along the skyline, with on it a continual to-and-fro of travelers. He looked back and saw that the Ditmarsh was invisible beneath a blanket of fog. It would clear in the sun and reform again at nightfall. No wonder that the Ditmarshers lived hand to mouth, and knew no invaders.
Shef was amused also to see how his companions changed as they came out on to the road. In the marsh they had been secure, confident, ready to sneer at the outside world and their neighbors. Here they seemed to put their heads down and hope to escape without attention. Shef found himself standing straight and looking round him, while the others stooped and closed up together.
Shortly a party on horseback caught up with them, ten or a dozen men riding together with pack animals, a salt-train heading north up the Jutland peninsula. As they rode past the Ditmarshers they called to each other in Norse.
“Here, see the mudfeet out of the fen. What have they come out for? Look, there’s a tall one, must have been mother’s little adventure. Hey, marshman, what are you looking for? Is it a cure for your spotted bellies?”
Shef grinned at the loudest laugher, and called back, in the fluent Norse he had learnt from Thorvin and then from Brand and his crew.
“What would you know about it, Jutlander?” He exaggerated the hoarse gutturals of the Ribe dialect they spoke. “Is that Norse you are speaking, or is it a disease of the throat? Try stirring honey in your beer and maybe you can cough it up.”
The traders checked their horses and stared at him. “You are no Ditmarsher,” said one of them. “You do not sound like a Dane either. Where are you from?”
“Enzkr em,” said Shef firmly. “I am an Englishman.”
“You sound like a Norwegian, and one from the back end of nowhere at that. I have heard voices like yours trading furs.”
“I am an Englishman,” Shef repeated. “And it is not furs I am trading. These folk and I are going to the slavering at Hedeby, where they hope to sell me.” He pulled his ladder pendant into view, turned his face full on to the Danes, and winked his one eye solemnly. “No need to keep it a secret. After all, I have to find a buyer.”
The Danes looked at each other and rode on, leaving Shef well content. An Englishman, with one eye, and a silver pole-ladder round his neck. It only needed one friend of Brand, or of the Way, or even one of his skippers from last year’s campaign gone home to retire to hear that, and Shef should at least have enough credit to get passage back to England: though he did not want to take ship from Hedeby on the Baltic shore.
Nikko scowled at him, feeling that the situation was slipping beyond his grasp. “I’ll have that spear of yours before we reach the market.”
Shef used it to point to the wooden stockade round Hedeby coming into view.
As he shuffled slowly forward in the line of merchandise for sale the next day, Shef felt his heart beating faster. He still had the inner calm—or was it indifference?—which had never left him since he woke up, king no more, in Karli’s hut. Yet though he knew what he planned to do, he could not know how it would be taken. It depended on what a man’s rights were. In the slave-market at Hedeby, what he and his friends could enforce, likely enough.