“Trouble is,” he smiled grimly, “the more often it happens the less likely most people are to be willing to try again. They lose heart. And there’s no need for it. We lost yesterday because nobody was ready, not physically, not in their minds either. If they’d spend a tenth of the time they spend in whining afterwards in getting ready beforehand, we’d have no need ever to lose a battle. As the proverb says: ‘Often the deed—late in doom diminishes, in all successes. Starves he later.’ Now show me your blade.”
Face unmoving, Shef drew it from its scuffed leather scabbard and passed it over. Edrich turned it thoughtfully in his hands.
“It looks like a hedger’s tool,” he remarked. “Or a reed-cutter’s bill. Not a real weapon. Yet I saw the Viking jarl’s sword snap on it. How did that happen?”
“It is a good blade,” Shef replied. “Maybe the best in Emneth. I made it myself, forged in strips. Much of it is soft iron. I beat it out myself from the iron blooms they send us from the South. But there are layers too of hard steel. A thane from March gave me some good spearheads in payment for work I did for him. I melted and beat them out, and then I twisted the iron and steel strips round each other and forged the whole into a blade. The iron lets it bend, the steel gives it strength. In the end I welded on a cutting edge of the hardest steel I could find. Four man-loads of charcoal the whole work cost me.”
“And with all that work you made it short and single-edged, like a work-tool. Put on a plain ox-bone handle, with no guard. And then you left it out in the wet and let it get rusty.”
Shef shrugged. “If I swaggered round Emneth with a warrior’s weapon on my hip and serpent-patterns glittering on the blade, how long would I have kept it? The rust is just enough to discolor the blade. I make sure it eats no further.”
“That was the other question I meant to ask you. The young thane said you were not a freeman. You behave as if you were in hiding. Yet in the fight you called Wulfgar ‘father.’ There is some mystery here. The world is full of thanes’ bastards, God knows. But no one tries to enslave them.”
Shef had faced the same question many times, and in another time or place would not have answered. But in the island in the fen, speaking one to another, status forgotten, the words came.
“He is not my father, though I call him that. Eighteen summers ago the Vikings raided here. Wulfgar was away from Emneth then, but my mother, the lady Thryth, was here, with her baby son Alfgar—my half brother, her child and Wulfgar’s. A servant got Alfgar away when the raiders came in the night, but my mother was taken.”
Edrich nodded slowly. All this was familiar enough. But still his question was not answered. There was a system in these matters, at least for those of rank. After a while, surely, the husband might have expected to hear from the slave-marts of Hedeby or Kaupang, to tell him such and such a lady was ransomable, at a price. If he did not, then he could have considered himself a widower, free to marry again, to set his fine silver bracelets on another woman who would rear his son. Sometimes, it was true, such arrangements were disturbed by the arrival, twenty years later, of some withered crone who had managed to outlive her usefulness in the North and bribe her way, God knew how, onto a ship that would take her home. But not often. Neither case explained the young man sitting before him.
“My mother returned, only a few weeks later. Pregnant with me. She swore that my father was the jarl of the Vikings himself. When I was born she wanted me named Halfden, because I am half a Dane. But Wulfgar cursed her. He said that was a hero’s name, the name of the king who founded the race of the Shieldings, from whom the kings of England and Denmark both claim descent. Too good for me. And so I was given a dog’s name instead. Shef.”