“Alas,” said Bruno in the silence, his Norse strongly accented. “I fear we shall all have to go home.”
Brand flushed angrily and started to reach over the table to grip Bruno’s hand in his own, meaning to crush it till he screamed for release. Bruno evaded the grasp easily, the smile never leaving his face.
Shef rapped the table. “Enough. Thank you, Brand, for your report. Count Bruno, if you wish to go home we will continue without you.” Shef held Bruno’s gaze for a moment, forcing him to drop his eyes. “The Count intended a mere pleasantry. He is as determined as the rest of us to put an end to these mad dogs and restore law to the Northlands.”
“Yes,” said Herjolf, “but how are we to do it?”
Shef held a hand out, palm flat. “That is paper.” He made it into a fist. “That is stone.” He extended two fingers only. “Those are scissors. Now, who will play this game with me? Count Bruno, you.”
Shef’s voice was strong and certain, coming strangely from the pallid face. He was sure that he could carry them with him, sure even that he could read his man’s mind well enough to win the game. What would Bruno do? He would not choose paper, that was sure. Stone or scissors? His own nature would be for the sharp cut. So he would choose stone, thinking others like himself.
“One, two, three,” Shef counted. Both men thrust their hands out together, Bruno’s a fist, Shef’s a flat palm. “Paper wraps stone, I win.”
Again, and this time Bruno would reject the scissors, which would have won last time, reject the stone which he had tried last. “One, two, three.” Bruno’s flat palm met Shef’s two fingers. “Scissors cut paper, I win again. But enough—” Bruno’s face was beginning to darken at the guffaws from Brand. “You see my point. They have big ships, and catapults, and ordinary ships. And big ships beat ordinary ships, as Brand has told us. Now what beats big ships? Catapults. And what beats catapults? Our plan must be always to oppose our strength to their weakness. Listen while I explain…”
As the council broke up, Shef sat back, hoarse from talking and tired still from loss of blood. Bruno, rising, performed a courteous bow in the direction of the scowling Brand, and then made his way to the head of the table.
“You have come a long way since they tried to sell you as a slave in Hedeby,” he remarked. He nodded to Karli behind Shef’s chair. “I see you still have your young Ditmarsher with you. But the weapon you have, that is not the one you were carrying then. May I examine it?”
Oddly reluctant, Shef reached behind him, took the lance from its place against the gunwale, passed it over. Bruno turned it over in his hands, examining its head.
“May I ask where you found this strange piece.”
Shef laughed. “It would take too long to tell the full story. In a smokehouse. I am told it belonged once to a jarl of the Tronds, one Bolli. But I never met him. Or not to speak to,” he added, remembering the long row of swinging carcasses. “You can see that at one time it was in the hands of Christians. Look, there are crosses on the cheek-pieces, inlaid once with gold. But that had been scraped out long before I came by it.”
Bruno turned the weapon in his hands, staring at the cross-marks on the blade. He handled it gently, reverently. After a moment he said, his voice quiet, “May I ask how the weapon came to you, if you never met its owner? This jarl Bolli of the Tronds. You found it somewhere? You took it from someone?”
Shef remembered the scene in Echegorgun’s smokehouse: how he had laid the weapon down, how Cuthred had picked it up and pressed it on him. There was something odd in the way Bruno was pursuing this. He was reluctant to tell him the full story.
“Let’s say it passed into my hands. It belonged to no-one at the time.”
“Some man had kept it, though? Some man gave it to you?”