Kar nodded, eyes unblinking. He would not wish his son luck or farewell. If he had had the black blood of his ancestors, he would have joined his father in the mound, preferring to sit with his treasures for eternity than to hand them over to the new king pushing up from the South, to enjoy life with dishonor, to be an under-king.
The trusted warriors, six of them, began to slaughter the slave-laborers and stack them round the ship. Then they and his son scrambled out. A few moments later the loose earth of the digging began to fall in clods on the deck, covering it quickly, mounting up over the planks and the canvas and the sheet of lead. Slowly he saw it rise, to his knees, to his chest. He sat unmoving, even when earth began to trickle into the stone chamber itself, to cover his hand on the whetstone.
Still a glimmer of light. More earth raining down. The glimmer gone, the dark deepening. Kar settled back finally, sighing with relief and contentment. Now he had things as they should be. And so they would stay forever. His.
He wondered if he would die down here. What could kill him? It did not matter. Whether he died or lived he would always be the same. The hogboy, the haugbui. The dweller in the mound.
Shef woke with a start and a gasp. Underneath the coarse blankets his body streamed sweat. Reluctantly he pulled them back, rolled with a grunt from the string-bed to the wet, tramped-earth floor. He seized his hemp shirt as the freezing air hit him, pulled it on, groped for the heavy wool tunic and trousers.
Thorvin says these visions are sent by the gods for my instruction. But what did that tell me? There was no machine in it this time.
The canvas flap over the booth-door pulled back and Padda the freedman shuffled in. Outside, the late January dawn showed only thick mist rising from the waterlogged ground. The Army would frowst late in its blankets today.
The names of the men in the dream: Kar and Kol. They did not sound English. Nor Norse, altogether. But then the Norsemen were great ones for shortening names. Guthmund was Gummi to his friends, Thormoth became Tommi. The English did it too. Those names in King Edmund’s riddle: “…Wuffa, Wehha’s offspring…”
“What’s your long name, Padda?” he asked.
“Paldriht, master. Haven’t been called that since my mother died.”
“What would Wuffa be short for?”
“Don’t know. Wulfstan, maybe. Could be anything. I knew a man once called Wiglaf. Very noble name. We called him Wuffa.”
Shef pondered as Padda began to blow carefully on the embers of last night’s fire.
Wuffa, son of Wehha. Wulfstan or Wiglaf, son of—Weohstan, it might be, or Weohward. He did not know those names—he must find out more.
As Padda fiddled with wood and water, his pans and the everlasting porridge, Shef unrolled the vellum mappamundi from its waxcloth wrapping, spread it out, corners weighted, on his trestle table. He no longer looked at the completed side, the side with the map of Christian learning. On the reverse he had begun to draw a different map. A map of England, putting down all the information he could uncover. He would sketch in rough outlines, names, distances, on birchbark. Only after information had been checked and proved consistent with what he knew already would he ink it in on the vellum itself. Yet the map still grew with every day, dense and accurate for Norfolk and the Fens, doubtful and patchy for Northumbria away from York, completely blank down in the South, apart from London on the Thames and the vague mention of Wessex to the west of it.
Padda had found a Suffolk man among the freedmen, though. In return for his breakfast he would tell Shef all he knew about the shire.
“Call him in,” said Shef, unrolling fresh birchbark and testing the point of his scratching-tool as the man entered.
“I want you to tell me all you can about places in your shire. Begin with the rivers. I know already of the Yare and the Waverly.”