Shef saw that there were other things piled carelessly in a corner. Clothes, mostly, thrown there in disorder. Glint of metal here and there, silver and enamel work and iron too. Whatever had caught and killed these people cared nothing for booty. It had all been tossed aside like horns or hooves or anything inedible. Was there a weapon there?
Two pegs on the wall supported between them a dozen long-shafted spears. Shef picked one up, realized immediately it was worm-eaten and bent from lying for years in the heat. He rummaged through them as silently as he could.
Junk, all of them. Split shafts, bent heads, metal thick with rust. He had to find something. He had only his tiny beltknife against a creature that could kill walruses and polar bears.
There. There was one. At the bottom of the pile Shef glimpsed a shaft that seemed to be sound. He picked it up, hefted it, felt relief sweep over him at the thought he was now not completely defenseless.
Somehow, as he hefted it, the idea of using it to strike and kill repelled him. It was as if a voice was telling him:
“No. This is not the tool for such a purpose. It would be like trying to pick hot metal from the forge with a hammer, or beating out iron with the haft of your tongs.”
Puzzled, Shef looked for a moment at what he held, his eye continually glancing in fear towards the entrance. A strange weapon. Not the sort anyone made nowadays. A leaf-shaped blade unlike the massive triangular head of Sigurth’s ‘Gungnir,’ a long iron spike below it set into an ash shaft. Traces of ornamentation on it. Someone had even cut into the iron and then set gold into the tracery. Once there had been two gold crosses at the base of the blade. The gold was gone now, betrayed only by a fleck of color, but the chiseled crosses remained. A war weapon, from the iron spike, and a javelin from its weight. But who would put gold on a javelin which you hurled at your enemy?
Someone had valued it, at any rate. Some one of the carcasses now hanging in the smoke. Shef hefted the weapon uncertainly once more. It was madness not to take any weapon that would give him a chance of survival in this deadly place. Why had he already put it back, laying it gently once more across its pegs?
Alarmed suddenly by some faint stir of air behind him, Shef span round. Someone, or something, coming. He crouched, looking along the floor beneath the rows of human and animal bodies.
Someone was walking towards him. With a flush of relief Shef recognized the cross-tied breeches of Cuthred. He stepped out into plain sight, beckoned his companion over, pointed wordlessly to the hanging corpses.
Cuthred nodded. His sword was bare in one hand, his shield ready in the other.
“I told you,” he whispered hoarsely. “Trolls. In the mountains. Peered at me through the windows of the hut. Rattled the door in the night to try to get in. They smelt meat. Thick bars they have on the doors in those mountain villages. Not that all of them need them.”
“What do we do?”
“Get them before they get us. The cabin opposite, you saw it? Let’s go. Have you no weapon?”
Shef shook his head mutely.
Cuthred stepped behind him, picked the spear he had just laid down from its pegs, held it out to him. “Here,” he said, “take this. Go on,” he urged, seeing Shef’s reluctance, “it doesn’t belong to anyone any more.”
Shef stretched out a hand, hesitated, gripped the weapon firmly. In the warm, smoky dark there came a faint ringing sound, as if the metal head had struck stone. Shef felt a kind of relief again. Not relief from defenselessness, rather relief that the weapon had been handed to him. It had passed from its owner to the master of the smokehouse, and then to Cuthred, the man who was not a man. It was right for him to hold it now. Maybe not to keep it, maybe not to strike with it. But hold it, yes. For now.