Shef pushed open the great wooden doors of the minster and walked in, his companions jostling behind.
From inside the minster came the antiphonal song of the choirmonks, facing each other across the nave and singing sweetly the anthems which called the Christ-child to be born. There were no other worshippers, though the doors were unbolted for them. The monks sang lauds every day, whether they were joined or not. At dawn on a winter morning they would not expect to be.
As the Vikings paced down the aisle which led to the high altar—still wrapped in sodden cloaks, no weapons showing except for the halberd over Shef’s shoulder—the abbot looked at them in shocked horror from his great seat in the choir. For a moment Shef’s nerve and wit faltered in the face of the majesty of the Church he had grown up in, worshipped in.
He cleared his throat, unsure how to begin.
Guthmund behind him, a skipper from the Swedish shore of the Kattegat, had no such doubts or scruples. All his life he had wanted to be at the sack of a really first-class church or abbey, and he had no intention of letting a beginner’s nerves spoil it. Courteously he picked his young leader up and put him to one side, seized the nearest choir-monk by his black robe and hurled him into the aisle, dragged his axe from under his cloak and embedded it with a thunk into the altar-rail.
“Grab the blackrobes,” he bellowed. “Search ’em, put ’em in that corner there. Tofi, get those candlesticks. Frani, I want all that plate. Snok and Uggi, you’re lightweights, see that statue there…” He waved at the great crucifix, high above the altar, looking down at them with sorrowing eyes. “Shin up it and see if you can get that crown off, looks genuine from here. The rest of you, turn everything over and shake it, grab everything that looks as if it might gleam. I want this place clear before those bastards behind us have got their boots on. Now, you…” He advanced on the abbot shrinking back in his throne.
Shef forced his way between them. “Now, father,” he began, speaking again in English. The familiar language drew a basilisk stare from the abbot, terrified but at the same time mortally offended. Shef wavered a moment—then remembered the inside of the minster door, covered, like many, with skin on the inside. Human skin, flayed from a living body for the sin of sacrilege, of laying hands on Church property. He hardened his heart.
“Your guards will be here soon. If you want to stay alive you will have to keep your men off.”
“No!”
“Then you die now.” The point of his halberd pushed at the priest’s throat.
“For how long?” The abbot’s shaking hands were on the halberd, could not move it back.
“Not long. Then you may hunt us, recover your stolen goods. So do as I say…”
Crashes of destruction behind, a monk being dragged forward by Guthmund. “I think this is the sacristan. He says the hoard is empty.”
“True,” the abbot admitted. “All was hidden months ago.”
“What’s hidden can be found again,” said Guthmund. “I’ll start on the youngest, just to show I mean it. One, two dead, the hoard-keeper will speak.”
“You will not,” Shef ordered. “We’ll take them with us. There will be no torture among those who follow the Way. The Asa-gods forbid it. And we have taken a fair haul. Now get them out where the minster-guards can see them. We still have a long ride ahead.”
In the growing light, Shef noticed something hanging on the wall: a flattened roll of vellum with no image on it that he could recognize.
“What’s that?” he asked the abbot.
“It has no value to one like you. No gold, no silver on the frame. It is a mappamundi. A map of the world.”
Shef tore it down, rolled it, thrust it deep inside his tunic as they hustled the abbot and the choirmonks out to face the ragged battle-line of Englishmen at last roused from bed.
“We’ll never make it back,” muttered Guthmund again as he clutched a clanking sack.