“You keep your shield up in battle,” Shef had explained to a doubtful Hagbarth. “At least if you’re expecting spears and arrows from a distance. And you keep it slanted so they’ll skid off. That’s what we’re going to try.”
Behind the laboring Fearnought and the large ships, as with the Ragnarsson fleet, came the mass of the attackers in the eighteen-oar-a-side craft that were the backbone of all Viking navies. Each towed behind it, hard to see in the sun-dazzle off the water, a smaller boat, fishermen’s skiffs like the grind-boats of the far north, all that the local fishing villages could raise. Each held four to eight rowers and two pairs of extra men jammed in. The rowers had again been carefully selected from the best of the Swedes and Norwegians. In each boat two men clutched crossbows, two more were Bruno’s German Ritters.
Watching from his place in the center, Sigurth Ragnarsson remarked, “Masts stepped, I see.”
“Does that mean there’ll be no funny business this time?” asked Ubbi.
“I doubt it very much,” answered Sigurth. “But we know some tricks ourselves now. Let’s hope they’re good ones.”
Shef stood on top of the forward mule, almost the only place left on the Fearnought from which one could now see anything. With his one eye he watched the Ragnarsson catapult battery. He was sharp-sighted, but not enough to see what he needed to. There had to be a way to look closer! He needed to know if they were ready to shoot. If they were cunning, they might hold their first volley till Olaf’s ships were in range, conceivably sink all four of them with their first rocks. If that happened the battle would be lost before it started, Shef’s “scissors”—for so he had mentally labeled the big vessels in his plan—blunted by the catapults’ “stone.” Yet he did not want to stop the ships too far out. The less distance that had to be covered by the small boats, the “paper” in his plan, the better.
They were close to being in range, he decided. He turned and waved to King Olaf, standing next to Brand on the forecastle of his heavy ship fifty yards off, three sweeps from side to side. Olaf waved in reply, called an order. As the rowers tossed their oars and the ship lost way, a thirty-pound boulder came sighing out of the sky, at extreme range. It plumped into the water ten feet from the prow of Olaf’s Heron, the splash throwing spray over the king. Shef grimaced. A little too closely calculated. Would they try again?
The four big ships had lost way, were being left behind as the Fearnought ground slowly on into catapult range. Behind them the mass of the fleet had tossed oars as well, were drifting gently forward. As they did so they dropped their tows. The dead silence of the approach was broken suddenly by harsh cheering. The skiffs had cast off, their fresh rowers straining at their oars, each boat making the best pace it could, treating the last mile as a race. As they swept past first their tow-ships and then the leading line of large craft, the oarsmen lined the side, cheering in unison as their boatswains called the time.
The first of the skiffs shot past the Fearnought, its helmsman one of Brand’s Halogalanders. Shef could hear him shouting, “Put your backs into it, will you, before some Swedish prick gets past us.” Shef waved to him, to the two skogarmenn crossbows crouched on the rear thwart, to Bruno in one of the pursuing boats, and to the rest of them pouring past, sixty of them spread out like hounds on the scent of a stag. His oarsmen were breathing too deep to cheer, driving their immensely heavy ship on at a quarter the speed of the racing skiffs.
How would the catapults take that? Shef saw spouts of water rise suddenly, two of them, then a third, and felt his heart leap. Every plume was a miss, every miss was one fewer chance to shoot, and a minute gained before they could rewind their clumsy machines. Yet there must have been a hit, yes, there, near the leading skiffs, men struggling in the water by shattered planks. No-one was stopping or slowing to pick them up. Shef had rubbed that in hard. No survivors will be rescued. Keep rowing and leave them. Some of the mailed men would drown, some, he hoped, keep themselves afloat on planks and swim to the nearer shore. The skiffs swept on like so many water-beetles, oars skimming. The Fearnought was perhaps a furlong closer to the grim, banner-waving line of the Ragnarsson fleet.