What they said brought Shef no comfort. They were the very few survivors of King Edmund’s picked men, who had fought to the last in the final attempt to destroy the Ragnarssons and cripple the Viking army’s leadership. All were wounded, usually badly. They expected to die, and talked quietly among themselves as they waited. Mostly, they regretted their failure to make a clean sweep of their enemies in the first few minutes of their attack. But then, they said, it could never have been expected that they could get to the heart of the Great Army without resistance. They had done well: burned the ships, killed the crews. “We have gained great glory,” said one. “We stand like eagles on the bodies of the slain. Let us not repent, whether we die now or later.”
“I wish they had not taken the king,” said one of the warrior’s comrades after a silence, speaking with difficulty through the wheezing of his pierced lung. At that they nodded soberly, and their eyes moved together toward a corner of the pen.
Shef shivered. He had no wish to face the aggrieved King Edmund. He remembered the moments when the king had come toward him, pleading with him—the gadderling, the thrall, the child of no father—to stand out of the way. If he had done so, the English would be counting the night still as a victory. And he would not have to face the wrath of Ivar. Dazed as he had been, Shef had heard the taunts of his captors about what their chief would do with him. He remembered the fool of a boy who had shown him round these selfsame pens only the evening before, and his stories of how Ivar dealt with those who crossed him. And he, Shef, had taken his woman. Taken her away, taken her carnally, taken her so that she would not be returned. What had happened to her? Shef wondered detachedly. She had not been dragged back with him. Someone had taken her off. But he could hardly worry about her anymore. His own fate was too all-encompassing. Above the fear of death, the shame of treachery, there loomed the fear of Ivar. If only, Shef thought again and again during the night, if only he could die now of cold. He did not wish to see the morning.
The thump of a boot in the back stirred him from torpor in the growing light of the next day. Shef sat up, conscious above all of the dry, swollen stick of his tongue. Round him the guards were cutting lashings, hauling bodies away; some had been granted Shef’s wish in the night. But in front of him squatted a small, slight figure in a stained and dirty tunic, drawn lines of fatigue on the sallow face. It was Hund. He was holding a crock of water. For some minutes Shef thought of nothing else, while Hund carefully, and with many agonizing pauses, allowed him to drink a mouthful at a time. Only when he felt the blessed fullness under his breastbone, and knew the luxury of being able to roll an excess mouthful round his tongue and spit it onto the grass, did Shef realize that Hund was trying to speak to him.
“Shef, Shef, try to take this in. We have to know some things. Where is Godive?”
“I don’t know. I got her away. Then I think someone else snatched her. But they had me before I could do anything about it.”
“Who do you think took her?”
Shef remembered the laugh in the thickets, the sense he had had, and had dismissed, that there were other fugitives in the wood. “Alfgar. He was always a good tracker. He must have followed us.”
Shef paused again for thought, dispelling the lethargy of cold and weariness. “I think he must have gone back, led Muirtach and the others to us. Maybe they did a deal. They got me, he got her. Or maybe he just snatched her while they were busy with me. There weren’t enough of them to risk following very far. Not after the fright they’d had.”
“So. Ivar is more concerned about you than about her. But he knows you got her away from the camp. That’s bad.” Hund passed a hand worriedly across his sparse, scanty beard. “Shef, think back. Did anyone see you actually kill any of the Vikings with your own hands?”