Not a boulder this time, a line, rising as it streaked across the river, then falling as it headed for the ladders. The hero on top of the one nearest them had his hand on the stone battlement, and was just reaching over to scramble across. The streak intersected with his body.
He smashed forward as if struck in the back by a giant, smashed so hard the ladder broke under him with the impact. As the ladder fell beneath him and he turned, arms flung wide, Shef saw the giant bolt projecting from the man’s spine. He folded over backward as if in two pieces and fell slowly onto the heap of his mates scrambling beneath him.
An arrow. But not an arrow. No human being could have shot it, nor heaved the boulder. Yet these things had happened. Shef walked forward slowly and considered the rock lying amid the ruins of the ram, ignoring the pitiful struggles and cries for help beneath it.
These things had been done by machines. And such machines! Somewhere inside the fort, maybe among the black monks, there must be a machine-master such as he had never imagined. He must find out. But now, anyway, he knew why he had helped the Army. Because he could not bear to see a machine mishandled. But now there were machines on both sides.
Brand had seized him, thrust “Thrall’s-wreak” into his hands, was hustling him away, snarling angrily at him.
“…standing there like a wittol, they’ll have a war-band out any moment!”
Shef saw they were almost the last men left on the cleared ground, the place of slaughter. The rest had filtered back down the hill as they had filtered up.
The Ragnarssons’ assault on York had failed.
Very carefully, tongue protruding between his teeth, Shef laid the keen blade of his meat-knife to the thread. It snapped. The weight on the end of the wooden arm dropped, the other end flew up. A pebble arced lazily across the forge.
Shef sat up with a sigh. “That is how it works,” he said to Thorvin. “A short arm, a heavy weight; a long arm, a lighter weight. There it is.”
“I am glad you are satisfied at last,” replied Thorvin. “Two days you have been playing with bits of wood and string, while I do all the work. Now maybe you can bear a hand.”
“I will, yes, but this is important too. This is the new knowledge that those of the Way must seek.”
“It is. And important. But there is the day’s work to be done as well.”
Thorvin was as keenly interested as Shef in the experiments, but, after a few attempts to help, had realized that he was merely standing in the way of the excited imagination of his former apprentice, and had gone back to the enormous pile of work an army, in being, created for its armorers.
“But is it new knowledge?” Hund asked. “Ingulf can do things no Englishman has ever been able to. And he learns how to do them by trial, and by taking to pieces the bodies of the dead. You are learning by trial, but you are only trying to learn what the black monks already know. And they are not playing with models.”
Shef nodded. “I know. I am wasting my time. I understand now how it can be done, but there are all kinds of things I do not understand. If I had a real weight here, like the one they really shot, then what kind of weight would I need to put in the other arm? It would be far greater than a dozen men could lift. And if it was as heavy as that, how could I wind down the long arm, the shooting arm? It would need some sort of a windlass. But I know now what the sound was that I heard just before the rock came over. It was the sound of someone cutting the rope, to release the rock.
“And there is another thing that bothers me even more. They shot one rock—that smashed the ram. If they had not hit with that one shot, the gate would have been down and all the machine-masters would be dead. They must have been very sure they could hit with the first shot.”