Brand raised his voice. “I say, young waker-of-warriors-untimely, if you avoid the blow you don’t need the helmet. And what in the name of Thor is that you are holding?”
Shef grinned again, and held up the strange weapon from the forge. He held it out horizontally, balancing it after an instant on the edge of one hand, just where wood joined metal.
“And what do you call that?” asked Thorvin. “A hewing-spear? A haft-axe?”
“A beard-axe that’s had bastards by a ploughshare?” suggested Brand. “I don’t see the use of it.”
Shef picked up Brand’s still-bandaged hand and gently rolled back the sleeve. He put his own forearm next to his friend’s.
“How good a swordsman am I?” he asked.
“Poor. No training. Some talent.”
“If I had the training, would I ever be fit to stand against a man like you? Never. Look at our arms. Is yours twice as thick round as mine? Or just half as thick again? And I am not a weak man. But I am a different shape from you, and yours is the shape for a swordsman, even more, an axeman. You swing a weapon as if it were a stick for a boy to slash thistles. I cannot do that. So if I were ever to face a champion like you… And one day I will have to face a champion like you. Muirtach maybe. Or worse.”
All five men nodded silently.
“So I have to even things up. With this, you see…” Shef began to twirl the weapon slowly. “I can thrust. I can cut forehand. I can strike backhand without reversing the weapon. I can change grip and strike with the butt. I can block a blow from any direction. I can use two hands. I need no shield. Most of all—a blow from this, even in my hands, is like a blow from Brand, which few survive.”
“But your hands are exposed,” said Brand.
Shef beckoned, and the Englishman in the forge nervously moved over. He held two more metal objects. Shef took them and passed them over.
They were gauntlets: leather-lined, leather-palmed, with long metal projections designed to fit halfway up the forearm. Yet the striking thing about them, the men saw as they peered more closely, was the way the metal moved. Each finger had five plates, each plate fitted to the next on small rivets. Larger plates fitted over the knuckles and the backs of the hands, but they too moved. Shef pulled them on, and slowly flexed his hands, opening and closing them round the shaft of his weapon.
“They are like the scales of Fafnir the dragon,” said Thorvin.
“Fafnir was stabbed in the belly, from below. I hope to be harder to murder.” Shef turned away. “I have another task to do. I could not have done all this in time without Halfi here. He is a good leather-worker, though he is slow with the bellows.”
Motioning the Englishman to kneel before him he began to file at the iron collar. “You will say there is not much point in freeing him, since someone will enslave him again immediately. But I will see him outside the Army’s watch fires in the night, and his master is shut up tight in York. If he has any sense or luck he will run away, run far away, and never be caught again.”
The Englishman looked up as Shef began gently to pry the soft iron from his throat. “You are heathens,” the slave said, not understanding. “Priest said you’re men with no mercy. You cut the arms and legs from the thane—I saw him! How can it be that you set a man free where the Christ-priests hold him a slave?”
Shef lifted him to his feet. He replied in English, not in the Norse they had been using before. “The men who crippled the thane should not have done what they did. Yet I say nothing of Christians and heathens, except that there are evil men everywhere. I can give you only one rede. If you do not know who to trust, try a man who wears one of those.” He gestured at the four men watching, who, following the speech, silently raised their silver pendants: hammers for Brand and Thorvin, the apples of Ithun for the two leeches, Hund and Ingulf.