Shef grinned and made a counter-offer of three entire silver pennies for three reindeer, one penny to be returned in exchange for their hides. Realizing with some relief that his guest was not completely insane, Piruusi cackled professionally and tried again.
As they reached a final agreement—ten silver pennies and a gold finger-ring for five reindeer, hides to be returned, and twenty pounds of bird feathers for sleeping bags—Pehto ended his song. With the lack of ceremony which the Finns seemed to use, he reached out of the tent and took a large steaming vessel passed in by the unknown hands that had beat the drum. He dippered out of it in turn four large mugs of hollowed pine and handed one each to Piruusi, Karli and Shef, kept the fourth himself.
“Drink,” he said, in Norse.
Shef passed his mug without words to Hund, who sniffed it carefully, dipped a finger in and licked it. As he did so Piruusi’s brow cleared. At last he had realized the function of the third man. He was a taster. Certainly the one-eye was a man of great importance, to have such a functionary.
“It is water in which the fly killer mushroom has been boiled.”
“Is it safe to drink?”
“Safe for you, I think. You are used to these things. I dare say it will do Karli no harm.”
Shef raised the mug politely to his host, and drank deep. Round him the others did the same. Shef observed that it seemed to be the polite thing to drink a third, pause, drink some more, pause again, and finish the draught. The liquid tasted hot, musty, with a faint bitterness: not pleasant, but better than many things Hund had made him swallow. The men sat in silence for a while, drifting into their own thoughts.
Shef felt his soul rise through his mouth and out, through the tent as if it were impalpable, out into the wide air and wheeling like a bird over the dark wood and the great expanse of white moorland that lay all around it. He noted with interest the lake, part-frozen, that lay on the other side of the wood, not far away: Ceolwulf had been right. But while his mind was interested, his soul was not. It darted away, like a flash, winging westwards. As it shot across land and sea, as fast as thought, the light came back into the world. At the place where it hovered, it was still evening, not night. Still autumn, not winter.
It was Hedeby. Shef recognized the mound where he had sat outside the walls and seen the terrible defeat and sacrifice that took place long ago. But the air of peace that hung over the countryside then, when he had sat there, was gone now. No contented plowman, no smoking chimneys. Instead a great camp of tents outside the wall, and lining the walls hundreds of men. It was like the siege of York that Shef had seen, and ended, two years before.
Except for two things. The walls were wood, not the stone of the Rome-folk. And the defenders had no mind to let the walls do all the work for them. Many were outside, skirmishing with the besiegers, fighting it out with sword and spear and battle-axe, exiting from sally-ports and wickets, making their raids, and returning hastily or triumphantly to the stockade.
Yet there was a pattern to the confusion, Shef slowly saw. And as he saw it, the conviction grew on him that he was not seeing the past, or some mythical story, or something that might have been. What he saw was taking place at the same moment as he sat in the Finn’s tent. It was a vision, but a vision of the real, one that needed no interpretation.
The besiegers were fighting to set up catapults, mules, by the knoll where Shef had sat. The besieged were trying to hinder them. Not successfully. But then they had only been playing for time. The skirmishers heard a horn blast, drew back. On the walls nearest to the three mules that the besiegers had set up were six, ten, a dozen of the simple stone-lobbing machines that Shef had himself invented, the pull-throwers. They were set up now on platforms broadening the stockade’s fighting gangways.