The buildings ended and before them was a cleared zone of mud and rubble with the yellow stone wall some eighty yards off, the wall the Rome-folk had made. Brand and his crew emerged from the alley, looked up at the top of the wall where figures moved and called jeeringly. A zip in the air, and an arrow thumped into the wattle and daub of a house wall. Another, and a Viking swore in anger as he looked at the shaft sticking from his hip. Brand reached over and pulled it out, glanced at it, tossed it over his shoulder.
“Hurt, Arnthor?”
“Just got through the leather. Six inches higher and it would have bounced off my jacket.”
“No punch,” remarked Brand again. “Don’t look at those fellows. Someone gets one in the eye now and then.”
Shef plodded forward, trying to ignore the zips and thuds like the others. “Have you done this kind of thing before?” he asked.
Brand halted, called to his crews to halt as well, turned toward the wall and promptly hunkered down on his heels.
“Can’t say I have. Not on this scale. But today we just do what we’re told. The Ragnarssons say they’ve a plan and they will take the city if everybody stands by to lend their weight where needed. So we watch and wait.
“Mind you, if anyone knows what they’re doing it should be them. Do you know, their old man, their father Ragnar, tried to take the city of the Franks—oh, it must be twenty years ago. Paris, it’s called. So the Ragnarssons have thought a lot about stone walls and cities ever since. Though it’s a far cry from some rath in Kilkenny or Meath to this. I’d like to see how they go about it.”
Shef leaned on his halberd and stared around him. To his front ran the stone wall, topped with battlements, men loosely scattered along it, no longer wasting arrows on the mass of the Army drawn up on the fringe of the cleared zone facing them, but clearly ready to shoot at any forward movement. Surprising, Shef thought, how little range even a great stone wall could give you. The men on top of their walls thirty feet were impregnable, unreachable. Yet the archers on the wall could do virtually nothing to the men standing watching them. At fifty yards’ range you were in danger, at ten you might well be dead. At eighty you could stand in the open and make your preparations at leisure.
He looked more closely at the wall. To the left, two hundred yards away, it ended in a round, jutting tower, from which men could shoot along the line of the wall, at least for as far as their bows would carry. Beyond the tower the ground dropped toward the brown and muddy Ouse, immediately beyond it on the other bank, the wooden stockade that guarded the river fringe of the colonia—Marystown, as the locals called it. It too carried a frieze of men, watching anxiously the preparations of the heathen so close, so out of range.
The Army waited, six- and eight-deep, facing the wall on a five-hundred-yard front; more packed into the mouths of the streets and alleyways, the steam of their breath rising into the air. Dull metal, grubby wool and leather were picked out only here and there by the bright paint on shields. The warriors looked calm, patient, like farmhands waiting for the owner.
There came a blare of horns from the center of the waiting ranks, maybe fifty or sixty yards to Shef’s right. Shef realized suddenly that he should have been studying the gate in the center of the wall. A wide street ran out from it, no longer prominent in the waste of mud and trampled wattle where houses had been, but clearly the main road out to the east. The gate itself was new, not work of the Rome-folk, but massively formidable for that. Its timbers were seasoned oak tree-trunks, fully as high as the towers on either side of it. Its hinges were the heaviest iron that English smiths could make.
Yet it was weaker than stone. Opposite it now, the four Ragnarssons strode forward. Shef picked out the tallest of them, looking almost frail beside his mighty brothers. Ivar the Boneless. Clad for the occasion in flaring scarlet cloak, grass-green breeches beneath his long mail-coat, shield and helmet silver-painted. He paused and waved to his nearest supporters, to a roar of recognition. The horns blew again, and the English on the wall responded with a cloud of arrows, to hiss by, thud into shields, bounce away from mail.