The whole Army was moving. Dividing. After a hundred heartbeats there was space between the two groups and both were edging further away from each other. The Ragnarssons in front of the furthest group; in front of the nearer one, Brand, Thorvin, a handful of others.
“It is the Way against the rest,” muttered the Frey-worshipper behind Shef. “And some of your friends thrown in. Two to one against us, I reckon.”
“You have split the Army,” said a Hebridean, one of Magnus’s crew. “It is a great deed, but a rash one.”
“The machine was wound,” replied Shef. “All I had to do was shoot it.
Chapter Six
As the army marched away from the walls of York, snowflakes started to drift out of the windless sky. Not the Great Army. The Great Army would never exist again. That part of the once-great army which now refused the command of the Ragnarssons and could no longer live in fellowship with them—perhaps twenty long hundreds of men, two thousand four hundred by the Roman count. With them were a host of horses, pack-horses, pack-mules and fifty wooden carts creaking along with their burden of heavy loot: bronze and iron, smith-tools and grindstones—along with the chests of poor coinage and a meager handful of true silver from the division. Their burden, too, of wounded men not fit to march or straddle a pony.
From the city walls, the rest of the army watched them go. Some of the younger and wilder members had whooped and jeered, even launched a few arrows at the ground behind their former messmates. But the silence of the marching column, and of their own leaders on the wall, cast down their spirits. They pulled their cloaks tighter about them, and looked up at the sky, the lowering horizon, the frostbitten grass on the slopes outside the city. Grateful for their own billets, stored firewood, shuttered windows and draftless walls.
“It will snow harder before tomorrow’s dawn,” muttered Brand from his position at the rear of the column, the main point of danger till they were well past the Ragnarssons’ reach.
“You are Norsemen,” replied Shef. “I thought snow would not bother you.”
“All right while the frost stays hard,” said Brand. “If it snows and then thaws, like it does in this country, we’ll be marching through mud. Tires the men out, tires the beasts out, slows the carts even more. And when you’re marching in those conditions, you need food. You know how long it takes an ox-team to eat its own weight? But we must put some distance between us and those behind. No telling what they’ll do now.”
“Where are we making for?” asked Shef.
“I don’t know. Who’s leading this army anyway? Everybody else thinks you are.”
Shef fell silent, in consternation.
As the last bundled figures of the rear-guard disappeared from view among the ruined houses of outer York, the Ragnarssons on the wall turned and looked at each other.
“Good riddance,” said Ubbi. “Fewer mouths to feed, fewer hands to share. What are a few hundred Way-folk anyway? Soft hands, weak stomachs.”
“No one ever called Viga-Brand soft-handed,” replied Halvdan. Since the holmgang he had been slow to join in his brothers’ attacks on Shef and his faction. “They’re not all Way-folk, either.”
“It doesn’t matter what they are,” said Sigurth. “They’re enemies now. That’s all you ever need to know about anyone. But we can’t afford to fight them just yet. We have to keep our hold on…”
He jerked his thumb at the little cluster a few yards away from them on the wall: Wulfhere the archbishop with a knot of black monks, among them the scrawny pallor of Erkenbert the deacon, now master of the mint.
Ivar laughed, suddenly. His three brothers looked at him with unease.
“We don’t need to fight them,” he said. “Their own bane marches with them. For some it does.”
Wulfhere too scowled at the retreating column. “Some of the blood-wolves gone,” he said. “If they had gone earlier we might never have needed to treat with the rest. But now they are within our gates.” He spoke in Latin, to make sure hostile ears did not overhear.