“We are followers of the Way,” Thorvin had said in partial explanation to the two youths, still speaking his careful English. “Not everyone wishes to be known as such—not in the camp of the Ragnarssons. Me they accept.” He tugged at the hammer pendant on his chest. “I have a skill. You have a skill, young smith-to-be. Maybe it will protect you.
“What of your friend? What can you do?”
“I can pull teeth,” replied Hund unexpectedly.
The half dozen men still standing round had grunted in amusement. “Tenn draga,” remarked one of them. “That er ithrott.”
“He says, ‘To draw teeth, that is an accomplishment,’ ” Thorvin translated. “Is it true?”
“It is true,” supplied Shef for his friend. “He says it is not strength you need. It is a twist of the wrist—that, and knowing how the teeth grow. He can cure fevers too.”
“Tooth-drawing, bone-setting, fever-curing,” said Thorvin. “There is always trade for a leech among women and warriors. He can go to my friend Ingulf. If we can get him there. See, you two, if we can get to our own places in the camp—my forge, Ingulf’s booth—we may be safe. Till then—” He shook his head. “We have many ill-wishers. Some friends. Will you take the risk?”
They had followed him mutely. But wisely?
As they came toward it, the camp looked more and more formidable. It was enclosed by a high earth rampart, with a ditch outside it, each side at least a furlong in length. Lot of work in that, thought Shef. Lot of spadefuls. Did that mean they were going to stay a long time, that they thought it worth doing so much? Or was it a matter of course to the Vikings? A routine?
The rampart was crowned with a stockade of sharpened logs. A furlong. Two hundred and twenty yards. Four sides—No, from the lay of the land Shef realized suddenly that one side of the camp was bounded here by the river Stour. On that side he could even see prows projecting into the sluggish stream. He was puzzled—until he realized that the Vikings must have pulled their ships, their most precious possessions, up on the mudflats there, then grappled them together so that they themselves formed one wall of the enclosure. Big. How big? Three sides. Three times two hundred and twenty yards. Each log in the stockade maybe a foot wide. Three feet to a yard.
Shef’s mind, as it so often did, tried to grapple with the problem of numbers. Three times three times two hundred and twenty. There must be a way to know the answer to that, but this time Shef could see no shortcut to finding it. It was a lot of logs, anyway, and big ones too, cut from trees hard to find down here on the flats. They must have brought the logs with them. Dimly, Shef began to discover an unfamiliar notion. He knew no word for it. Making plans, perhaps. Planning ahead. Thinking things out before they happened. No detail was too small for these men to trouble with. He suddenly realized that they did not think war was only a matter of the spirit, of glory and speeches and inherited swords. It was a trade, a matter of logs and spades, preparation and profit.
More and more men came into view as they trudged up to the ramparts, some of them simply lounging at ease, a group round a fire apparently cooking bacon, others throwing spears at a mark. They looked very much like Englishmen in their grubby woolens, Shef decided. But there was a difference. Every group of men Shef had ever seen before had had in it its proportion of casualties, men not fit to stand in the line of battle: men whose legs had broken and had been set awry; men undersized, deformed; men with bleared eyes from the marsh fever or with old head injuries that affected the way they talked. There were none like that here. Not all were of great stature, Shef was rather surprised to see, but all looked competent, hard-bitten, ready. Some adolescents, but no boys. Bald men and grizzled men, but no palsied elders.