“What were you doing?” Shef asked.
“Helping Ingulf. It’s amazing what he can do. That man there was wrestling, fell awkwardly—leg broken, just like that. What would you do with that if you were back at home?”
Shef shrugged. “Bandage it up. Nothing else you can do. In the end it would heal.”
“But the man would never walk straight again. The bones would just join each other wherever they happened to be. The leg would be all lumps and twists—like Crubba, who was rolled on by his horse. Well, what Ingulf does is pull the leg out straight before he starts bandaging, squeezes hard to feel if the broken ends of the bone are together. Then he bandages the leg between two stakes, so that the whole thing stays straight while it is healing. But what is even more marvelous is what he does in cases like this one, when it’s broken so badly that the bones are sticking up through the skin. If he has to he even cuts back the bone, and opens the leg so that he can push the bone back straight! I didn’t think that anyone would live through being opened and cut like that. But he is so quick—and he knows exactly what to do.”
“Could you learn to do it?” Shef asked, watching the glow of enthusiasm on his friend’s normally sallow face.
“With enough practice. Enough instruction. And something else. Ingulf studies the bodies of the dead, you know, to see how bones fit together. What would Father Andreas say to that?”
“So you mean to stay with Ingulf?”
The runaway slave nodded slowly. He pulled from under his tunic a chain. On it was a small silver pendant, an apple.
“Ingulf gave it me. The apple of Ithun the Healer. I am a believer now. I believe in Ingulf and the Way. Maybe not in Ithun.” Hund looked at his friend’s neck. “Thorvin has not converted you. You are not wearing a hammer.”
“I wore one for a bit.” Shef spoke briefly about what had happened. “I may have a chance now of rescuing Godive and getting away. Maybe if I watch for long enough God will be good to me.”
“God?”
“Or Thor. Or Othin. I’m beginning to think that it makes no difference to me. Maybe one of them is watching.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No.” Shef gripped his friend’s arm. “We may not see each other again. But if you leave the Vikings I hope one day I will have a place for you. Even if it’s just a hut in the fen.”
He turned and headed for the place he had not dared even to look at when they first entered the Viking camp days before: the Vikings’ command tents.
The domain of the four Ragnarsson brothers ran from east wall to west wall, a full furlong along the riverfront. At its heart, in the center, were the great meeting tent—with room in it for tables for a hundred men—and the decorated tents of the brothers themselves. Round each of these four clustered the tents of women, dependents, the most trusted immediate bodyguards. Further away ran the lines of bivouac tents of the soldiers, usually three or four tents for every ship’s crew, sometimes with smaller ones scattered through for the captains, helmsmen, and champions. The retinues of the brothers for the most part kept separate, if close together.
The Snakeeye’s men were mostly Danes: It was common knowledge throughout the army that in time Sigurth would return to Denmark to challenge for the kingdom in Sjaelland and Skaane which his father had owned, and would go on one day to challenge for the rule of Denmark from the Baltic to the North Sea—a kingdom no man had possessed since the days of that King Guthfrith who fought Charlemagne. Ubbi and Halvdan, men with no stake and no claim to any throne other than that which their strength might bring them, recruited from anywhere: Swedes, Gauts, Norwegians, men from Gotland and Bornholm and all the islands.
Ivar’s men were mostly exiles of one sort or another. Many no doubt were mere murderers escaping vengeance or the rule of one law or another. But the bulk of his following came from the floating population of Norsemen who for generations had been moving into the Outer Isles of the Celtic regions: the Orkneys and Shetlands, then the Hebrides, the Scottish mainland. For years these men had been tempered in the constant skirmishes of Ireland and Man, Strathclyde and Galloway and Cumbria. Among themselves they boasted—but the claim was fiercely rejected by many, especially the Norwegians, who viewed Ireland as their own property to keep or dispose of—that one day Ivar Ragnarsson would rule the whole of Ireland from his castle by the black pool, the Dubh Linn itself, and would then lead his victorious navies in triumph against the feeble kingdoms of the Christian West. The Ui Niall might still have a say in that, muttered the Gaddgedlar among themselves, speaking Irish as none of the Hebridean or Scottish Norsemen would deign to. But they said it quietly. For all their race pride they knew that they themselves were the most hated of all by their countrymen, apostates from Christ, accomplices of those who had brought fire and slaughter to every part of Ireland. Who had done it for pay and for power, not merely for joy and for glory, as had been the Irish custom since the days of Finn and Cuchulainn and the champions of Ulster.