“Change target?” shouted a captain, pointing at the advancing men.
“No! The Worm again! Shoot.”
Another hail of darts into the tight-packed throng, and again the Worm went down. No time to see if it would come up again, or if Brand would now finish the job. The lever-men were still winding desperately but they would not get in another shot.
Shef reached down with his armored gloves, seized “Thrall’s-wreak” and the helmet he had never yet worn in battle.
“Halberdiers in the carts,” he shouted. “Just fend them off. Catapulteers, use your levers, use your mattocks.”
“What about us, master?” Fifty unarmed freedmen still clustered behind the carts, hammer-emblems on their jerkins. “Shall us run?”
“Get under the carts. Use your knives.”
Moments later the Ragnarsson wave reached them in a turmoil of glaring faces and slashing blades. Shef felt a weight roll from him. There was no need for thought now. No responsibility for others. The battle would be won or lost elsewhere. All he had to do now was swing his halberd as if he were still beating out metal at the forge: ward and cut, lunge overhand and stab downward.
On level ground the Ragnarsson followers would have rolled over Shef’s outnumbered and half-armed force in instants. But they had no idea of how to fight men in farm wagons. Their enemies were feet higher than themselves, behind oak planks. The halberds Shef had made for them gave Magnus and his Hebrideans extra feet of reach. Vikings lunging under the halberds and trying to haul themselves into the carts were simple targets for the clubs and mattocks of the English thralls. Knives in skinny hands ripped upward at thigh and groin from behind sheltering wheels.
After a few desperate trials the Vikings fell back. Orders barked from the more level-headed among them. Men slashed the oxen free, seized the drag-poles, prepared to haul the carts off the thralls underneath. Javelins poised, ready for a united volley against the exposed halberdiers.
Shef found himself staring suddenly into the eyes of Muirtach. The big man paced forward, his own ranks parting for him, like a great wolf. He wore no mail, only the saffron plaid which left his right arm and torso bare. He had thrown away his targe, and carried only the dagger-pointed longsword of the Gaddgedlar in two hands.
“You and me now, boy,” he said. “I’m going to keep yer scalp and use it for a bum-wipe.”
In answer Shef jerked the pin free and kicked the wagon tilt down once more.
Muirtach charged before he could straighten up, faster than Shef had ever seen a human being move. Reflex alone hurled Shef backward, stumbling on the wheel of the machine behind him. But Muirtach was already in the cart, swordpoint down for the thrust. Shef leapt back again, cannoning off Magnus, unable to drop his halberd enough to stab or guard.
Muirtach was swinging already. A lunging lever from Cwicca deflected his stroke, guided it onto the bowstring of the fully wound but unloosed catapult.
A deep twang, a thwack louder than a whale-fluke on water.
“Son of the Virgin,” said Muirtach, staring down.
One arm of the catapult, released, had slammed forward the six inches which were all that it could travel. In those six inches it had expended all the stored energy that could drive a barb a mile. The whole side of Muirtach’s bare chest was crushed in as if from the hammer-blow of a giant. Blood ran from the Irishman’s mouth. He stepped back, sat down, slumped back against the wagon wall.
“I see you have turned Christian again,” said Shef. “So you will remember, ‘an eye for an eye.’ ” Reversing his halberd, he drove its butt-spike deep through Muirtach’s eye and into the brain.
In the brief seconds of the confrontation everything had changed. Shef looked up and saw only backs. The Ragnarsson attackers had turned away, were throwing down their weapons, unbuckling their shields. “Brother,” they shouted, “fellow, messmate.” One, incongruously, was pulling open his tunic, hauling out a silver emblem. A Wayman, maybe, who had decided to stay with a father or a chief rather than march out of York. Behind them hundreds of men were moving forward in a bristling wedge, the giant figure of Brand at its apex. In front of the wedge the plain was covered only with men running, men limping, men standing in knots with their hands raised. The Ragnarsson army had broken. Its survivors had the choice only of running for their lives in heavy mail or hoping for immediate mercy.