“The other thing I have to say is this: I did not think Skuli and his men would get over the wall. I did not think they would even get to the wall. These machines, these towers, they are something we have never seen before. I thought they were a toy, and that everything would be finished with just some arrowshot and wasted sweat. If I had known different I would have told Skuli not to risk his life and waste his men. I was wrong, and I am sorry.”
Skuli nodded in a dignified way and walked back to his place.
“Not enough!” yelled a voice from the crowd. “What about compensation? Wergild for our losses!”
“How much did you get from the priests?” yelled another. “And why don’t we all share?”
Sigurth raised a hand again. “That’s more like it. I ask the Army: what are we here for?”
Brand stepped out, waving his axe, back of his neck purpling instantly with the effort in his shout. “Money!”
But even his voice was drowned in the chorus: “Money! Wealth! Gold and silver! Tribute!”
As the tumult died down, Sigurth shouted back. He had the meeting well in hand, Shef realized. All this was going according to a plan, and even Brand was going along with it.
“And what do you want the money for?” called Sigurth. Confusion, doubt, shouts of different answers—some ribald.
The Snakeeye drove on over them. “I’ll tell you. You want to buy a place back home, with people to till it for you, and to never touch a plough again. Now I’m telling you this: there’s not enough money here to get you what you want. Not good money.” He threw a handful of coins derisively on the ground. The men recognized the useless low-alloy coinage they had found so often already.
“But that isn’t to say we can’t get it. Just that it’s going to take time.”
“Time for what, Sigurth? Time for you to hide your take?”
The Snakeeye stepped a little forward, his strange white-rimmed eyes searching the crowd for the man who had accused him. His hand reached for his sword-pommel.
“I know this is open meeting,” he called, “where all may speak freely. But if anyone accuses me or my brothers of not acting like warriors, then we will call him to account for it outside the meeting!
“Now I tell you. We took a ransom from the minster, right enough. Those of you who stormed the wall took loot as well, from the dead and from the houses inside the wall. All of us profited from what was taken outside the minster.”
“But all the gold was inside the minster!” That was Brand shouting, still incensed, and well forward so that he could not be mistaken.
A cold look from Sigurth, but no check. “I tell you. We will all pool all that we took—ransom, loot, whatever—and divide it up crew by crew as has always been the custom of the Army.
“And then we will lay a further tribute on this shire and this kingdom, to be delivered before the end of the winter. They will pay in bad metal, sure enough. But we will take that metal and melt the silver out of it and coin it again ourselves. And that we will divide up so that everyone gets his share.
“Only one thing. To do that we need the mint.” A buzz as the unfamiliar word was repeated. “We need the men to make the coins and the tools to make them with. And they are in the minster. They are the Christian priests. I have never said this before, but I say it now.
“We have to make the priests work with us.”
This time the dissension in the Army went on a long time, with many men stepping forward and speaking confusedly. Shef realized slowly that Sigurth’s point was being carried, had a certain appeal to men tired of profitless harrying, yet there was determined resistance—from adherents of the Way, from men who simply disliked and distrusted Christians, from those whose still resented losing the sack of the minster.
And the resistance was not dying down. Violence at a meeting was almost unheard-of, for the penalties were so severe. Yet the crowd was fully armed, even to mail, shields and helmets, and every man in it used to striking out. There was always the chance of an outburst. The Snakeeye was going to have to do something, Shef thought, to get the crowd back under control. Just at the moment one man—it was Egil from Skaane, who had taken a tower to the wall—had got the attention of the Army with a furious diatribe about the treachery of the Christians.