“The other army, the one we have left, marches behind the black raven, the carrion bird. I say that the sign of the Christians is for torture and death. Our sign is the sign of a maker. Tell them that. And I will give you an earnest of what the hammer can do for you. We’re taking off your collar.”
The slave was shaking with fear. “No, the black monks, when they return…”
“They will kill you most horribly. Remember this and tell the others. We offered to free you, we pagans. But fear of the Christians is keeping you a slave. Now go.”
“One thing I ask. In fear. Do not kill me for speaking of it but—your men are emptying the meal-bins, taking our winter store. There’ll be empty bellies and dead bairns before spring comes if you do that.”
Shef sighed. This was going to be the hard bit. “Brand. Pay the thrall. Pay him something. Pay him in good silver, mind, not the archbishop’s dross.”
“Me pay him! He should pay me. What about the wergild for the men we have lost? And since when did the Army pay for its supplies?”
“There is no Army now. And he owes you no wergild. You trespassed on his land. Pay him. I’ll see you don’t lose by it.”
Brand muttered under his breath as he untied his purse and began to count out six silver Wessex pennies.
The slave could scarcely believe what was happening, staring at the shining coins as though he had never seen money like this before; perhaps he hadn’t.
“I will tell them,” he said, almost shouting the words. “About the banner too.”
“If you do that, and return here tonight, I will pay you six more—for you alone, not to share.”
Brand, Thorvin and the others looked doubtfully at Shef as the slave went out, with an escort to see him outside the sentry-fires.
“You’ll never see money nor slave again,” Brand said.
“We’ll see. Now I want two long hundreds of men, with our best horses, all with a good meal inside them, ready to move as soon as the slave returns.”
Brand pushed a shutter open a crack and looked at the night and the whirling snow. “What for?” he grunted.
“I need to get your twelve pennies back. And I have another idea.” Slowly, intense concentration furrowing his brow, Shef began to scratch lines into the table in front of him with the point of his knife.
The black monks of St. John’s Minster at Beverley, unlike those of St. Peter’s at York, did not have the safe walls of a legionary fortress round them. Instead, their tenants and the men of the flatlands east of the Yorkshire Wolds could easily put two thousand stout warriors into the field, with many more half-armed spearmen and bowmen to back them. All through the autumn of raids of York, they had known themselves safe against anything but a move by a major detachment of the Great Army. They had known it must come. The sacristan had disappeared months since with all the minster’s most precious relics, reappearing days later with word only for the abbot himself. They had kept half their fighting force mobilized, the rest dispersed among their holdings to oversee the harvest and the preparations for winter. Tonight they felt secure. Their watchers had seen the Great Army split, one detachment even marching away to the South.
But a midwinter night in England is sixteen hours long between sunset and dawn: more than time enough for determined men to ride forty miles. Guided on their way through muddy, meandering farm-tracks for the first few miles, then picking up speed as they walked or trotted their horses along the better roads of the Wolds. They had lost a little time circumventing each village they came to. The slave, Tida, had guided them well, abandoning them only as the first paling sky had shown them the steeple of Beverley Minster itself. The guard-huts just beginning to disgorge sleepy female quern-slaves, to light the fires and grind the grain for the breakfast porridge. At the sight of the Vikings they ran shrieking and wailing, to drag incredulous warriors from their blankets. To be called fools for their pains and to become part of the utter confusion which was the English way of taking surprise.