“Second,” cut in the black-robed priest, staring fixedly at Thorvin, “there are Christians among you who have deserted their faith and betrayed their masters. They must be handed over for punishment.”
“You included,” said Alfgar. “Whatever happens to the others, my father and I will not see you march away. I will put the collar on you with my own hands. Think yourself lucky we do not treat you as we did your father.”
Shef did not bother to translate for Guthmund.
“What did you to my father?”
Wulfgar had not spoken till then. He sprawled in his box, held by the straps. Shef remembered the yellow, pain-racked face he had last seen in the trough. Now Wulfgar’s face was ruddy, his lips showing red in the white-streaked beard.
“What he did to me,” he said, “I did to him. Only more skillfully. First we took the fingers, then the toes. Ears, lips. Not his eyes, so he could see what we did, nor his tongue, so he could still call out. Hands, feet. Knees and elbows. And never allowed to bleed. I whittled him like a boy whittling a stick. In the end there was nothing left but the core.
“Here, boy. A memorial of your father.”
He nodded and a servant threw a leather pouch in Shef’s direction. Shef loosed the strings, glanced inside, hurled it at Cwichelm’s feet.
“You are in poor company, warrior,” he remarked.
“Time to go,” said Guthmund.
The two sides backed away from each other, turned at safe distance. As they stepped briskly toward their own lines, Shef heard the Mercian warhorns bellow, heard a roar and a clash of mail as the English army came on.
Instantly, as prearranged, the Wayman line turned tail and ran. The first stage of its long, planned retreat.
Hours later, as the long winter twilight faded into dark, Brand muttered dry-throated to Shef, “I think we may have done it.”
“For the day,” Shef agreed. “I see no hope for the morning.”
Brand shrugged massively, called the orders to stand down, light fires, heat water, make food.
All day the Waymen had fallen back, screening Shef’s machines, shooting as the Mercians deployed, making them check, loading the carts and pack-horses hastily and then falling back in sections to another line. The Mercians had followed them like men anxious to tether a savage dog, closing in, drawing back from the snarls and snaps, pressing forward again. At least three times the two armies had clashed hand to hand, each time when the Waymen had had some obstacle to defend: the ditch they had cut, a dyke along the edge of the fen, the shallow muddy stream of the Nene. Each time, after half an hour’s slashing and hewing, the Mercians had fallen sullenly back, unable to force the crossing—and in doing so, exposed themselves again to the lash of the boulders and the barbs.
The Waymen had fought better as their spirits rose, thought Shef. The trouble was, the Mercians were learning too. At the start they had flinched from the first whistle in the sky, the first displayed twist-shooter in a battle-line. Each ditch in the boggy soil made them hesitate. Sigvarth must have taught them a bitter lesson in the fen.
But as the day wore on they grew bolder, seeing the true weakness of the Wayman numbers.
Still holding a half-eaten bowl of porridge, Shef sank back on a pack-saddle and fell into instant sleep.
He woke, stiff, clammy and bitterly cold, as the horns blew for first light. All round him men clambered to their feet, drank water or the last hoarded remains of ale or mead. They shuffled to the crude breastwork they had made in the hamlet Brand had selected for their last stand.
As the light grew they looked out on a sight to daunt the boldest. The army they had fought the day before, like themselves, had grown steadily more ragged—clothes sodden, shields defaced with muck, its men grimed up to their eyebrows, weakened by a steady trickle of casualties and deserters—down to the point where it was barely half again their own size.
It had gone. In its place, drawn up in front of them, rank on rank, horns blasting a continual challenge, stood a new army, as fresh as if it had never marched a mile. Shields blazed with new paint, mail and weapons glinted red in the dawn. Crosses towered over the ranks, but the banners—the banners were different. Next to the crosses, a golden dragon.