“I can tell you that,” said Thorvin. “For I have looked well into this matter. We have all seen how poor their money is here. Little silver, much lead, much copper. Where has all the silver gone? Even the English ask each other that. I can tell you. The Church has taken it.
“We do not understand—even Ivar cannot know—how rich the Church in Northumbria is. They have been here two hundred years and all that time they have taken gifts of silver, and of gold, and of land. And from the land they wring more silver, and from the land they do not own they wring yet more. To splash a child with water, to make her wedding holy, in the end to bury them in holy soil and take away the threat of eternal torment—not for their sins, but for failure to pay the toll.”
“But what do they do with this silver?” Farman asked.
“They make ornaments for their god. It all lies now in the minster, as useless as when it was first in the soil. The silver and the gold in their chalices, in their great roods and rood-screens, in the plates for the altar and the boxes for the bodies of their saints—it comes out of the money. The richer the Church, the poorer the coinage.” He shook his head in disgust.
“The Church will hand nothing over—and Ivar does not even know what lies in his hand. The priests have told him that they will call in all the coins of the realm and melt them down. Purge out the base metal and leave him only the silver. And then with that they will make him a new coinage. A coinage for Ivar the Victorious, king of York. And Dublin too.
“The Ragnarssons may not be richer. They will be more powerful.”
“And Brand, son of Barn, will be poorer!” snarled an angry voice.
“So what we have done,” summed up Skaldfinn, “is to bring the Ragnarssons and the Christ-priests together. How sure are you now of your dream, Farman? And what of the world’s history and of its future?”
“There is one thing I did not dream then,” replied Farman. “But I have dreamed him since. And that is the boy Skjef.”
“His name is Shef,” put in Hund.
Farman nodded agreement. “Think of it. He defied Ivar. He fought the holmgang. He broke the walls of York. And he walked up to Thorvin’s meeting months ago and said he was one who came from the North.”
“He only meant he came from the north part of the kingdom, from the Northfolk,” protested Hund.
“What he meant is one thing, what the gods mean is another,” said Farman. “Do not forget also: I saw him on the other side. In the home of the gods itself.
“And there is another strange thing about him. Who is his father? Sigvarth Jarl thinks he is. But for that we have only his mother’s word. It comes to me that perhaps this boy is the beginning of the great change, the center of the circle, though no one could have guessed it. And so I have to ask his friends and those who know him a question:
“Is the boy mad?”
Slowly, eyes turned to Ingulf. He raised his eyebrows.
“Mad? That is not a word to be used by a leech. But since you put it to me in that way, I will tell you. Yes, of course the boy Shef is mad. Consider…”
Hund found his friend, as he had known he would, standing amid a litter of charred wood and iron at the northeast tower, above the Aldwark, surrounded by a knot of interested pendant-wearers. He slipped between them like an eel.
“Have you worked it out yet?” he asked.
Shef looked up. “I think I have the answer now. There was a monk with each machine, whose duty was to see it destroyed instead of captured. They started the job, then scuttled back to the Minster. The men they left behind had no great desire to see the burning finished. This slave was captured,” he nodded at a collared Englishman inside the ring of Vikings. “He told me how it worked. I haven’t tried to rebuild the machine, but I understand it now.”