Shef laughed, looking across at the massive silver buckle holding together his friend’s cloak, the bulging purse on his sword-belt, the ornamental waist-chain of linked silver coins.
“Tell me, Brand, how did your trip home go? Were you able to buy all you meant to?”
Brand’s face took on a hucksterish look of caution. “I put some money in safe hands. Prices are high in Halogaland, and folk are mean. Still, when I hang up my axe for good, it may be there is some small farm for me to retire to in my old age.”
Shef laughed again. “With your share of all our winnings, in good silver, you must have bought up half the county for your relatives to look after.”
This time Brand grinned too. “I did pretty well, I admit. Better than ever in my life before.”
“Well, let me tell you about the blackrobes. What none of us has ever realized is the money the stay-at-homes have. The wealth in a whole county, a rich county of England, not a poor stony one in Norway where you come from. Tens of thousands of men, all tilling the soil and raising sheep and trimming wool and keeping bees and cutting timber and smelting iron and raising horses. More than a thousand square miles. Maybe a thousand thousand acres. All those acres must pay something to me, to the jarl, if it is only the war-tax, or bridge-and-road money.
“Some of them pay everything. I took all Church land into my own possession. Some of it I gave at once to the freed slaves who fought for us, twenty acres a man. Wealth to them—but a fleabite compared to the whole. Much I leased out straightaway, to the rich men of Norfolk, at low rates, for ready money. Those who got it will not want to see the Church come back. Much I kept in my own hand, for the jarldom. In future it will make money for me, to hire workers and warriors.
“But I could not have done it without the blackrobes, as you call them. Who could keep all this land, all these goods, all these leases, in his head? Thorvin knows how to write in our letters, but few others. Suddenly there were many lettered men, men of the Church, with no land and no income all of a sudden. Some now work for me.”
“But can you trust them, Shef?”
“The ones who hate me and will never forgive me, or you, or the Way—they have gone off to King Burgred, or to Wulfhere the Archbishop, to stir up war.”
“You should have just killed them all.”
Shef hefted his stone scepter. “They say, the Christians, that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. I believe them. I make no martyrs. But I made sure that the angriest of those who left knew the names of those who stayed. The ones who work for me will never be forgiven. Like the rich thanes, their fate now depends on mine.”
They had come to a low building within the stockade that ran round the jarl’s burg, its shutters open to the sun. Shef pointed inside to the writing-desks, the men conferring quietly, writing on parchment. On one wall Brand could see hung a great mappa: a newly made one, devoid of ornament, full of detail.
“By the winter I shall have a book of every piece of land in Norfolk, and a picture of the whole shire on my wall. By next summer not a penny will be paid for land without my knowledge. And then there will be wealth such as even the Church has never seen. We can do things with it that have never been done before.”
“If the silver is good,” said Brand dubiously. “It is better than up North. I have been thinking this: It seems to me that there is only so much silver in this country, in all the kingdoms of the English put together. And there is always the same amount of work for it to do—land to buy, things to trade. Now, the more that there is locked up in the coffers of the Church, or traded for gold, or made into precious things that do not move, the more the less that is left—No, the harder the less that is left…”