Ivar stepped back, a coil of something blue-gray and slippery in his hand.
“He’s opened his belly and pulled his gut out,” commented Brand.
Ivar stepped over to the pole, pulling gently but remorselessly on the uncoiling intestine, watching the look of despair and agony on the king’s face with a half-smile. He reached the pole, took a hammer, nailed in the free end he had extracted.
“Now,” he called out. “King Ella will walk round the pole till he pulls his own heart out and dies. Come, Englishman. The quicker you walk, the quicker it will be over. But it may take a few turns before you reach that. You have ten yards to walk, by my count. Is that so much to ask? Start him, Muirtach.”
The henchman stepped forward, brand glowing, thrust it against the doomed king’s buttock. A convulsive start, a face turning gray, a slow shuffle.
This was the worst death a man could face, thought Shef. No pride, no dignity. The only way out, to do what your enemies wanted, and to be jeered for it. Knowing you must do it and come to an end, and yet not able to do it quickly. The hot irons behind so you could not even choose your own pace. Not even a voice to scream. And all the time your bowels pulling out from inside.
He passed his halberd silently to Brand, and slipped back through the shoving, craning crowd. There were faces looking down from the tower where he had left his helpers to keep an eye on their machine. A rope snaking down as they realized what he wanted. A scramble up the wall to the familiar clean smell of new-sawn wood and new-forged iron.
“He has walked round the pole three times,” said one of the Vikings on the tower, a man with the phallus of Frey round his neck. “That is no way for any man to go.”
Bolt in place, the machine swiveled round—they had thought, yesterday, to rest the bottom frame on a pair of stout wheels. Barb upright between the vanes, three hundred yards, it would still shoot a little high.
Shef aimed the tip of the barb on the wound at the base of the king’s belly as he hobbled round to face the wall a fourth time, red-hot brands urging him on. Shef squeezed the release slowly.
The thump, the line rising and falling—clear through the center of Ella’s chest and straining heart, and on into the ground behind him, almost between Muirtach’s feet. As the king was hurled backward by the force of the blow, Shef saw his face change. Relax in peace.
Slowly the crowd rippled, every face in it turning to face the tower from which the shot had come. Ivar bent over the corpse, but then straightened, turning too, hands clenched.
Shef took one of the new halberds and went down the wall toward the throng, wanting to be recognized. At the edge of the semicircle he stopped, vaulted onto the battlement.
“I am only a carl,” he called out, “not a jarl. But I have three things to say to the Army:
“First, the sons of Ragnar fulfilled this bit of their Bragi boast because they had no heart to fulfill the rest.
“And second, whatever the Snakeeye says, when he sneaked into York by the back door with the priest holding it open for him, he was not thinking of the Army’s good, but of his own and of his brothers’. He had no mind to fight and no mind to share.”
Shouts of anger, the Gaddgedlar whirling, looking for the gate into the city and the steps up to where Shef stood. Others obstructing them, grabbing at their plaids. Shef raised his voice even more above the din.
“And third: to treat a man and a warrior the way they treated King Ella has no drengskapr. I call it nithingsverk.”
The work of a nithing, a man beneath honor, a man with no legal rights, worse than an outlaw. To be proclaimed nithing before the Army was the worst shame a carl—or a jarl—could endure. If the Army agreed.
Some people were shouting agreement. Shef could see Brand down there, axe raised now and ready to strike, his men clustering behind him, thrusting off Ragnarsson followers with their shields. A stream of men coming from the other side of the circle to join him—Egil the Heimdall-worshipper at their head. Who was that moving out? Sigvarth, face flushed as he shouted reply to some insult. Skuli the Bald wavering by Ella’s corpse as Ubbi bellowed something at him.