Her voice began to quake and she pulled her stained apron up to her eyes.
“And then they made us watch…”
Her voice was drowned in tears. After a few moments she seemed to remember something and moved suddenly. She gripped Shef’s hand and for the first time looked directly at him.
“But Shef. It was him. It was the same one as last time.”
“Sigvarth Jarl?” asked Shef, his mouth thick.
“Yes. Your… your…”
“What did he look like? Was he a big man, dark hair, white teeth?”
“Yes. With gold bracelets all up his arm.” Shef thought back to the moments of conflict, felt again the snap of the sword breaking and the moment of delight with which he had stepped forward to stab. Could it be that God had saved him from a terrible sin? But if that were the case—what had God been doing afterward?
“Couldn’t he protect you, mother?”
“No. He didn’t even try.” Thryth’s voice had gone hard and controlled again. “When they broke ranks after… after the show, he told them to loot and enjoy themselves till the warhorns blew. They kept their slaves, tied them together; but the rest of us, Truda and the ones they weren’t keeping… We were just handed over.
“He recognized me, Shef! And he remembered me. But when I begged him just to keep me for himself he laughed. He said… he said I was a hen now, not a chicken, and hens must look after themselves. Especially hens who flew away. So they used me like Truda. They used me more because I was the lady, and some of them thought that this was something very funny.” Her face twisted with anger and hatred, her pain forgotten for the moment.
“But I told him, Shef! I told him that he had a son. And that his son would one day seek him out and kill him!”
“I did my best, mother.” Shef hesitated, another question forming on his lips. But Edrich, behind him, spoke first.
“What did they make you watch, lady?”
Again Thryth’s eyes filled with tears. Unable to speak, she waved vaguely at the outside of the shelter.
“Come,” said Truda. “I will show you the Vikings’ mercy.”
The two men followed her out, across the ashy remains of the village green, to where another makeshift shelter had been set up near the ruin of the thane’s house. A small huddle of people stood outside it. Occasionally one would break away and walk inside, look, and come out again. Their expressions were unreadable. Grief? Anger? Mostly, thought Shef, it was just plain fear.
Inside the shelter stood a horse-trough, half filled with straw. Shef recognized at once Wulfgar’s blond hair and beard, but the face between them was that of a corpse: white, waxy, the nose pinched and the bones sticking through the flesh. Yet the man was not dead.
For a moment Shef could make no sense of what he saw. How could Wulfgar lie in a horse-trough? He was too big. He was six feet tall, and the horse-trough—Shef knew it well from the beatings of his youth—was barely five feet long…. There was something missing.
Wulfgar had something wrong with his legs. His knees reached the bottom of the trough, but then there were only clumsy bandages, wrapped round and round the stumps, with dark blood and foul matter clotted in them. A smell of corruption, and of burning, drifted up to Shef.
With growing horror he saw that Wulfgar appeared to have ho arms either. The bits that were left were crossed on his breast, the limbs ending in stumps and bandages just below the elbows.
A voice murmured behind them. “They brought him out in front of us all. Then they held him over a log and chopped off his arms and legs with an axe. Legs first. After each one they seared the stump with a red-hot iron, so that he would not die from loss of blood. First he cursed them and fought, but then he began to beg them to leave him just one hand, so that he could feed himself. They laughed. The big one, the jarl, said they would leave him everything else. Leave him his eyes so he could see fair women, and his balls, so he could desire them. But he would never be able to take down his own breeches, never again.”