“I want to come,” Hund had said.
“It will be dangerous,” Shef had replied.
Hund had said nothing, as was his custom when he felt nothing more needed to be said. It was dangerous to stay in Emneth too. And Shef and Hund, in their different ways, increased each other’s chances.
“If you are coming you will have to get that collar off,” Shef had said, glancing at the iron collar which had been fitted round Hund’s neck at puberty. “Now is the time. No one is interested in us. I’ll get some tools.”
They had sought shelter in the marsh, not wanting to draw attention. It had been a difficult business getting the collar off even so. Shef had filed through it, first putting rags inside the collar to save Hund’s neck from rasps, but once broken through it had been hard to get the tongs inside the circlet to bend it open. In the end Shef had lost patience, wrapped the rags round his hands, and pulled the collar open by main strength.
Hund had rubbed the calluses and weals where the iron had worn his neck and stared at the U-shape of the bent collar. “Not many men could do that,” he had observed.
“Need will make the old wife trot,” Shef had answered dismissively. Yet secretly he was pleased. He was coming into his strength, he had faced a grown warrior in battle, he was free to go where he would. He did not yet know how he could do it, but there must be a way to free Godive, and then leave the disasters of his family behind.
They had set out without further words. But trouble had begun at once. Shef had expected to have to dodge a few inquisitive people, sentries, maybe levies heading for the muster. Yet from the first day of travel he had realized that the whole countryside was beginning to buzz like a wasps’ nest stirred with a stick. Men cantered down every road. Outside every village groups waited, armed and hostile, suspicious of every stranger. After one such group had decided to hold them, ignoring their story of being sent to borrow cattle from a relative of Wulfgar’s, they had had to break and run for it, dodging spears and outdistancing their pursuers. But clearly orders had gone out and the folk of East Anglia had for once decided to obey wholeheartedly. There was fury in the air.
For the last two days Shef and Hund had crept through the fields and hedges, going painfully slowly, often on their bellies in the mud. Even so, they had seen patrols out, some of them horsemen commanded by a thane or a king’s companion, but others—and these the more dangerous ones—moved quietly on foot like themselves, armor and weapons padded to prevent jingle or clink; marshmen in the lead, carrying bows and hunters’ slings for ambush or stalk. They meant, Shef realized, to keep the Vikings in, or at least to prevent them coming out in small parties for private plunder. But at the same time they would be only too happy to catch and hold, or kill, anyone they thought might have any intention of giving the Vikings aid, information, or reinforcement.
Only in the last couple of miles had the danger receded; and that, the pair soon understood, was only because they were now within the range of the Vikings’ own patrols—these easier to avoid, but at the same time more menacing. They had spotted one group of men waiting silently within the borders of a small wood, maybe fifty of them, all mounted, all armored, great axes resting on shoulders, the man-killing battle-spears bristling above them like a gray-tipped thorn thicket. Easy to see, quite easy to avoid. But it would take a full-scale incursion by the English to drive them off or defeat them. The village patrols would stand no chance.
These were the men to whose mercy they now had to trust themselves. It did not seem as easy now as it had at Emneth. To begin with, Shef had had a vague idea of reaching the camp and declaring his relationship to Sigvarth. But there would be far too much chance of being recognized, even from the few seconds of contact they had had. It was terrible luck that had brought him into hand-to-hand combat with the one person in the camp who might—or might not—have accepted him. But now Sigvarth was one person they had to avoid at all costs.