It was too great. Such losses could not be borne.
Far away, a hundred and fifty miles to the south, the same growing light reached the eyes of a woman, snuggled deep in a nest of down mattress and woolen rugs piled high against the cold. She stirred, shifted. Her hand touched the warm, naked thigh of the man next to her. Recoiled as if it had touched the scales of a mighty adder.
He is my half brother, she thought for the thousandth time. Son of my own father. We are in mortal sin. But how could I tell them? I could not tell even the priest who married us. Alfgar told him we had sinned carnally while fleeing from the Vikings and now prayed God’s forgiveness and blessing on our union. They think he is a saint. And the kings, the kings of Mercia and of Wessex, they listen to all he says of the menace of the Vikings, of what they did to his father, of how he fought at the Viking camp to set me free. They think he is a hero. They say they will make him an alderman and set him over a shire, they will bring his poor, tormented father home from York, where he is defying the heathens still.
But what will happen when our father sees us together? If only Shef had lived…
As she thought the name, Godive’s tears started to leak slowly, as they did every morning, through closed eyelids onto the pillow.
Shef marched down the muddy street, between the lines of booths which the Vikings had set up to keep out the winter weather. His halberd rested on his shoulder, and he wore his metal gloves, but the helmet remained at Thorvin’s forge. Mail and helmets may not be worn in holmgang, they had told him. The duel was fought as a matter of honor, so mere expediencies, like surviving and killing your enemy, were not the point.
That did not mean you would not be killed.
And a holmgang was a four-man affair. Each of the two principals took turns to strike at the other. But each principal was covered from the blows of the other by his second, the shieldbearer, who carried a shield for him and intercepted the strokes. Your life depended on the skill of your second.
Shef had no second. Brand and all his crews were still away. Thorvin had pulled his beard frantically, thumping his hammer again and again into the ground with frustration, but as a priest of the Way he could take no part. If he offered, his offer would be refused by the umpires. The same went for Ingulf, Hund’s master. The only person he might have asked was Hund, and as soon as Shef framed the thought, he knew that Hund—once he realized the situation—would surely volunteer. But he had immediately told his friend he must not think of helping. All other considerations apart, he was sure that at the critical moment, with a sword-blow descending, Hund would stop to observe a heron in the marsh or a newt in the fen, and would probably kill them both.
“I will see it through myself,” he told the priests of the Way, who had gathered together from the whole Army to advise him, much to Shef’s surprise.
“This is not why we spoke for you to the Snakeeye, and saved you from the vengeance of Ivar,” said Farman sharply—Farman the priest of Frey, famous for his wanderings in the other worlds.
“Are you then so sure of the ways of fate?” Shef had replied, and the priests had fallen silent.
But in truth, as he walked toward the place of the holmgang, it was not the duel itself which bothered him. What bothered him was whether the umpires would let him fight on his own. If they did not, then he would stand for the second time in his life at the mercy of the Army’s collective judgement, the vapna takr. At the thought of the roar and the clash of weapons that accompanied a decision, his guts knotted within him.
He marched through the gates of the stockade and out onto the trampled meadow by the river where the Army was assembled. As he walked forward, a buzz of comment rose, and the watching crowd parted to let him through. At their center stood a ring of willow wands, only ten feet across. “The holmgang should strictly be fought on an island in a stream,” Thorvin had told him, “but where there was no eyot suitable, a symbolic one was marked out instead. In a holmgang there was to be no maneuvering: The participants stood and cut at each other till one was dead. Or could fight no more, or ransomed himself off, or threw down his weapons, or stepped outside the marked area. To do either of the two last meant submitting yourself to the mercy of your opponent, who could demand death or mutilation. If a fighter showed cowardice, the judges would certainly order either, or both.