His hand before him met not earth floor but vacancy. A push and his head and shoulders were over a gap. Cautiously, he reached forward again. Solid earth, two feet ahead, leading only downward. The builders did not want to make this too easy, he thought.
But I know what must be there. I know this is not a trap, but an entrance. So I must crawl down, round the bend. My face will be in the soil for a foot or two, but I can hold my breath for long enough.
If I am wrong, I will die smothered, face down. The worst thing will be if I struggle. That I will not do. If I cannot get through I will push my face in the earth and die.
Shef crawled over the edge and twisted his body down. For a moment he could not make his muscles force him on, as his legs retained a lingering grip on the level floor he had left. Then he pushed himself down, slid a foot or two, and stuck. He was jammed upside down in the tunnel in the pitch-black.
Not a nightmare, no panic. I must think of this as a puzzle. This cannot be a blind alley, no sense to it. Thorvin always said that no man bears a better burden than sense.
Shef groped round him. A gap. Behind his neck. Like a snake he slid into it. And there was level floor again, with this time a gap leading upward. He heaved himself into it, and for the first time in what seemed an age, stood upright. Beneath his fingers he found a wooden ladder.
He climbed unsteadily upward. His head bumped against a trapdoor. But a door designed to be approached from outside would not open so readily from within. There could be feet of earth heaped on top of it.
Pulling the whetstone from his belt he braced himself against the shaft-wall and stabbed upward with the sharpened end. The wood splintered, creaked. He struck again and again. When he could get a hand through broken wood he wrenched more free. Sandy soil began to patter down into the tunnel, rushing faster and faster as the hole widened and the pale sky of dawn appeared above.
Shef hauled himself exhaustedly from the tunnel, emerging inside a copse of dense hawthorns, no more than a hundred paces from the barrow he had entered so long ago. On the barrow-top stood a knot of figures, staring down. He would not hide nor crawl away from them. He straightened up, settled the circlet, hefted the whetstone and walked quietly over toward them.
It was Hjörvarth, his half brother, as he had almost expected. Someone saw him in the growing light, cried out, fell back. The clump of men drew away from him, leaving Hjörvarth in the middle, by the still-unfilled hole. Shef stepped over the body of one of his English diggers, cut from shoulder to chest by a broadsword. He was aware now that Guthmund had a group of men drawn up fifty yards off, weapons drawn but unready to interfere.
Shef looked wearily at the horse-toothed face of his half brother.
“Well, brother,” he said. “It seems you want more than your share. Or are you maybe doing this for someone who is not here?”
The face in front of him tightened. Hjörvarth pulled his broadsword free, thrust his shield forward and paced down the slope of the barrow.
“You are no son to my father,” he snarled, and swung his broadsword.
Shef lifted the wrist-thick whetstone into its path. “Stone blunts scissors,” he said as the sword snapped. “And stone crushes skull.” He whipped the stone round backhand and felt the crunch as one of the carved, savage faces at one end sank into Hjörvarth’s temple.
The Viking staggered, fell on one knee, propping himself for a moment with his broken sword. Shef stepped sideways, measured the blow and swung with all his strength. Another crunch of bone, and his brother toppled forward, blood streaming from mouth and ears. Slowly, Shef wiped the gray matter from the stone and looked round at the gaping men from Hjörvarth’s crew.